Chapter 1 Introduction

“Statistics is the grammar of science.”     — Karl Pearson

1.1 Overview

This course is presented in the service of a project of your choosing and will offer you an intensive hands-on experience in the quantitative research process. You will develop skills in generating testable hypotheses, understanding large data sets, formatting and managing data, conducting descriptive and inferential statistical analyses, and presenting results for expert and novice audiences. It is designed for those who are interested in developing skills that are useful for working with data and using statistical tools to analyze them. No prior experience with data or statistics is required.

Our approach is “statistics in the service of questions.” As such, the research question that you choose (from data sets made available to you) is of paramount importance to your learning experience. It must interest you enough that you will be willing to spend many hours working to answer it.

1.2 Lesson

In this lesson, you will learn about the resources available to you. This e-textbook will give you a brief introduction for each topic, a link to video lessons, example code (or point-and click instructions) for the statistical platform you will be using, and basic instructions for project-based assignments. Click HERE to watch the video introduction.

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