Data as Evidence

Catalog description

Section information text: Human services professional practitioners use statistics in a variety of professional undertakings, such as creating studies to assess human behavior or deciding which programs are most effective for meeting clients' needs. In this course, students explore how statistical methods empower human services professional practitioners to assess human behavior, evaluate program effectiveness, and lead evidence-based change. Students also encounter basic descriptive and inferential statistical methods commonly used in the social sciences, and they work toward developing the skills to write, analyze, and critique social science research. Topics include frequency distributions, measures of central tendency, hypothesis testing, and statistical tests such as single-sample, independent-sample, and related-sample t tests; analysis of variance; correlation; and chi-square tests. This course also introduces the SPSS statistical software package.