5 credits

Psychology practitioners use statistics in a variety of professional undertakings, such as creating studies to assess human behavior or deciding which treatment approaches are most effective for a specific client. Students in this course are provided with a thorough analysis of basic descriptive and inferential statistical methods commonly used in the social sciences. Students work toward developing the skills with which to write, analyze, and critique social science research. They learn various methods, including computation and analysis of frequency distributions, measures of central tendency, and statistical hypothesis testing. Students also examine statistical tests (and underlying assumptions), including z-score; single-sample, independent-sample, and related-sample t-tests; analysis of variance; correlation, regression; and chi-square tests. Students are introduced to the SPSS statistical software package.