PSYCH 200Elementary Statistics in Psychology

4 credits · Psychology · Penn State

This course provides an introduction to the descriptive and inferential statistics commonly used in psychology, and to hypothesis testing as a method of scientific investigation. It also explores the ways in which the assumptions of statistical tests place constraints on experimental design and, conversely, how the design of experiments can dictate the statistical test appropriate for data analysis. The ability to understand and perform statistical analyses, and to evaluate the match between statistical analysis and experimental procedures, is critical to reading and understanding the empirical research that psychology is based upon, and that will be covered in upper-level psychology courses such as PSYCH 301W , for which PSYCH 200 is a pre-requisite, most 400-level courses, and certain lower-level psychology courses. In addition to performing some statistical tests by hand, students may also conduct statistical tests via statistical software packages commonly used by psychologists, such as SPSS or R. Finally, this course will include material on the responsible and effective communication of statistical results to a scientific audience according to APA guidelines. Specific topics covered include probability theory, scales of measurement, measures of variability and central tendency, normal curves, graphical displays (e.g., histograms, bar charts), the relation between samples and populations, correlations, simple regression, basic mean differences tests (e.g., t-tests), effect sizes, and confidence intervals. Classes may also cover z-tests, simple and factorial ANOVA, non-parametric tests (e.g., Chi Square, Mann-Whitney U, Wilcoxon), statistical power, or other statistical techniques commonly used in psychology.