NB: all readings are to be completed before class on the week indicated.

August 27, 2019
understanding ourselves when n = 330,000,000

quick review of some basic concepts:
– variables
– levels of measurement
– samples vs. populations
– descriptive vs. inferential statistics
– central tendency
– dispersal

September 3, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 5, and
(skim) O’Boyle Jr., Ernest and Herman Aguinis. 2012. “The Best & the Rest: Revisiting the Norm of Normality of Individual Performance.” Personnel Psychology (65)79-119.

probability and the normal distribution
– freaky pervasiveness and relevance
– areas under the curve
– z scores

September 10, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 6, and
Rothschild, David and Sharad Goel. 2016. “When You Hear the Margin of Error is Plus or Minus 3 Percent, Think 7 Instead.” New York Times October 5.

the Central Limit Theorem
– why the universe looks like it does
– why inferential statistics work

confidence intervals
– for means
– for proportions

September 17, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 7, and
Nuzzo, Regina. 2014. “Statistical Errors: P Values, the ‘Gold Standard’ of Statistical Validity, Are Not as Reliable as Many Scientists Assume.” Nature 506(February 13):150-2.

the logic of hypothesis testing
– the provisional nature of all scientific knowledge
– null vs. alternative hypotheses
– one vs. two tailed tests
– type I vs. type II error
– statistical power

September 24, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 7, and
Amrhein, Valentin, Sander Greenland, and Blake McShane. 2019. “Scientists Rise Up Against Statistical Significance.” Nature 567:305-307.

t tests
– single sample test of proportions
– two samples, independent
– two samples, matched or pretest/posttest
– test for difference of proportions

October 1, 2019
class meets in UAC 424 for graded assignment
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 8, and
Wasserstein, Ronald L., Allen L. Schirm, and Nicole A. Lazar. 2019. “Moving to a World Beyond ‘p < 0.05.'” The American Statistician 73:sup1:1-19.

ANOVA

October 8, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 9

chi-square
– crosstabs
– adjusted residuals

Mann-Whitney’s U

October 15, 2019
midterm exam

October 22, 2019
reading:
(skim) Schoenfeld, Jonathan D. and John P.A. Ionnidis. 2013. “Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 97(127-34).

the logic of random sampling
– why the samples really truly need to be random
– random error vs. systematic error
– selection biases
– non response biases
– response biases (social desirability, wording effects, order effects, testing effects, anchoring heuristics)

October 29, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 10

correlation
– direct, inverse, and curvilinear relationships
– scatterplots
– dependent and independent variables
– correlation vs. causation, extraneous variables redux
– partial correlation
– coefficient of determination

November 5, 2019
class meets in UAC 424 for graded assignment
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 11

linear regression
– the deep logic of the least squares line
– how to find the line of best fit and how to deal with the nearly limitless mojo it imparts to s/he who wields it

November 12, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 11

multiple regression
– regression to the mean
– multivariate relationships (spurious, multicausal, mediated, suppressed, interacting)
– the linear multivariate regression model
– interpreting regression coefficients, beta weights, R, and R square

November 19, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 11, and
Yong, Ed. 2019. “A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers. The Atlantic May 17.

multiple regression
– multicollinearity, scourge of the social sciences
– dummy variables

logistic regression

November 26, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 12

Spearman’s Rho

Gamma

December 3, 2019
reading:
Levin, Fox, and Forde chapter 12

Phi and Cramer’s V

review for final exam

December 10, 2019
8:00 p.m.
final exam