STATISTICS IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SP '01

PURPOSE AND APPROACH
This course serves one broad purpose: to help you better understand quantitative analyses in criminal justice research and policy. This broad goal breaks down into the following specific aims:

Statistical reasoning is concerned with a range of abilities, many that you already have! For example, recent work suggests that nine different mathematical abilities have been acquired by the human species over many thousands of years! CLICK HERE
   You were born with these. Once you know what an average is your inner mathematician will allow you to critically evaluate statements like Garrison Keillor's comment on Prairie Home Companion that in Lake Woebegon "all the children are above average."
   In this course we will be using these in-born skills, and adding to them. In particular, you will be learning about probability theory, hypothesis testing, and the like, and how these operations relate to real world questions and problems.
  

Doing statistics means examining a particular problem and, having decided on your statistical approach, actually doing the statistics. We will be involved in several types of "doing" in this course: constructing and interpreting a limited number of graphical data displays; calculating specific statistics; and figuring out what the returned values mean.
   You may wonder: will I have to actually calculate some statistics by hand, i.e., with a calculator? Yes you will.
   You may wonder: Why do we do this? So that you become better acquainted with these abstract terms like mean and variance.
   You may wonder: will I have to memorize some definitions? Yes you will, but more important than memorizing the definitions is developing an ability to think about what these definitions MEAN.

 Throughout I will attempt to apply these ideas to real world, specific problems. More on this later. We also will be spending a lot of time with two data sets. One you will generate. Early in the semester you will complete an in-class questionnaire. We will then be working with these data in class and outside of class and in your papers. In addition, we will be working with a national survey file completed in 1994. To help with the focus on real-world issues these two data files will have a lot of information about one set of issues: guns and attitudes towards guns.

Running statistics on computers and interpreting refers to a broad range of skills you will need. (SEE SURVIVAL GUIDE if you are not computer savvy). We will be spending about one class a week in the computer lab, learning how to run one particular statistics program called SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). This package can generate more statistical output than you or I can learn in a lifetime.
   You will learn how to enter numeric information into a data file, label the variables, and save the file.
   You will learn how to display data graphically, and how to interpret those displays.
   You will learn how to generate statistical output, and interpret that output.

Applying statistics means understanding how the statistics apply to a particular problem or issue at hand. Some statistics are descriptive; some statistical tests are explanatory. But the bottom line is how these statistics help you understand or describe a specific issue. That is why you will be writing a paper about how statistics apply to a particular problem.