Sociology 2205A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Likert Scale

• School: Western University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: Sociology 2205A/B
• Professor: Stephen Lin

Document Summary

Lecture 1 introduction to course: welcome to 2205. Likert scale, temperature (cold, mild, hot), list of options . What is statistics: one possible informal answer: the science and art of testing meaningful patterns out of messy data, a better, more informal answer: set of mathematical tools for organizing and analyzing data. Key vocab: dataset: an organized collection of data. Types of variables: level of measurement: nominal: scores are only labels; no mathematical operations are possible (i. e. ) gender, race, province, ordinal: scores can be ranked but other mathematical operations make no sense (i. e. ) Interval-ratio: scores are actual numbers (i. e. ) age in years, weight in kg, income in $: why do the types matter, we use different statistics for different types of variables. 2 steps in analyses: there are 2 essential steps in statistical analyses: descriptives and inference, to understand this, let"s think about the entire research process from asking to answering a sociological research question.