SCWK 9964 Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis

This course introduces basic statistics and practical applications of data analysis in social work research and evaluation. The course aims to teach students pragmatic tools for assessing basic statistical analyses. Students will learn: (1) descriptive statistics including measures of central tendency and variability; (2) hypothesis testing using chi-square, t-tests, one way ANOVA, correlation, and simple regression; (3) presenting and interpreting statistical results, and (4) using SPSS statistical package for data analysis. Other topics will be covered are data acquisition/management, data cleaning, data transformation, and introduction to SAS and Stata statistical packages. Upon completion of this course, students should be able to think critically about data and apply standard statistical to describe the data and to draw conclusions from such analyses.