Quantitative Methods and Statistics for the Social Sciences

To provide students with a solid foundation of fundamental statistical tools aimed not only at understanding but also at the proper application of quantitative methodologies for analyzing and solving complex problems in the social sciences.

At the end of the course a student will have acquired the appropriate terminology and will have learned the main tools of descriptive statistics (construction of indices, tables and graphs and interpretation of the same) and of inferential statistics (point estimation, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing).
In particular, he/she will be able to apply the right statistical technique to analyse data and to solve common real-life problems. He/she will be able to construct and read frequency tables and to interpret the most common statistical indices; to calculate and to interpret point estimates and confidence intervals and to test the most common statistical hypotheses. Finally, he/she will be able to perform a simple linear regression through a statistical software and to interpret the output.