Sociology 2830 – Methods of Data Analysis

“Classical social science, it may be said in tribute, is, among other things,

an attempt to improve the chances that our guesses about important matters may be right”’ – C. Wright Mills

Course Description:

This course is designed to introduce students to the topic of sociological inquiry. More specifically, it is designed to train students how, as a sociologist, one asks questions of the social world. The sociological method, as the means by which we collect data, is varied and diverse, but inevitably interwoven. In this course you will learn how social scientists design means for the collection of information, how this information is assessed, and what types of activities this information can inform.

During the semester, you will complete a very important journey in the research process: the research proposal. Step by step you will develop each important piece of this proposal along with competence in the sociological method.

Course Goals:

This course is designed to introduce students to the methods that sociologists, criminologists, and other social scientists use to summarize and analyze relationships in numerical data. Such data are concerned with individual people, such as survey items and demographic characteristics, and rates and counts of social behavior (e.g., crime, unemployment, TANF recipients) for aggregate units of analysis such as nations, states, counties, and cities.

Through this course, each student will learn how to use data analytic methods in the social sciences. Major topics include frequency distributions, graphical presentations of data, measures of central tendency, measures of variability, cross-tabulation, statistical inference (significance tests), and bivariate regression and correlation.

The specific course objectives include:

· Overcome students’ anxieties and fears of working with numbers

· Improve students’ critical thinking and problem solving skills

· Enhance students’ computer skills through use of SPSS to manage and analyze data

· Develop students’ competence in calculating basic descriptive and inferential statistics using a hand calculator and SPSS

· Develop students’ competence in interpreting basic descriptive and inferential statistics

· Develop students’ competence in using graphs and charts to summarize quantitative information

By the completion of this course, student are able to calculate the appropriate measures of central tendency and variation for variables in a data set, analyze data using SPSS, test hypotheses using the appropriate significance tests, present research results in tables, or in graphs or charts, write about your research findings in an appropriate manner, and critique quantitative research conducted by other social researchers.

Resources:

Data Analysis Links (coming soon)