A ten week course covering the following:
- The principles of critical enquiry and the distinction between meaning and causes. Scepticism and Occam’s razor
- Probability theory and its application to inference. Chance, and its measurement.
- Statistics, distributions, the normal distribution, means and variance.
- Collecting and displaying data. Types of data e.g. continuous, dichotomous. Parametric and non-parametric statistics.
- Types of research: on populations. Sampling and surveys. Confounding and selection bias.
- Types of research: on individuals. Selection, tests, interviews, questionnaires, self-ratings, observer ratings.
- Questionnaire design. Psychometric properties. Consistency. Reliability. Validity.
- Planning and designing a study. Power calculations. Ethics. Randomizing, control, wait list designs.
- Statistical significance. Practical significance. Replication and meta-analysis. Specificity and sensitivity: receiver operating characteristics.
- Reading and learning from the literature. A practical exercise.