Aims
To give students an introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics and to help them understand the purpose and meaning of statistics. The module is designed to make students familiar with the various statistics used in economics and will give them a preliminary introduction to the statistical computer program SPSS.

Learning outcomes
On completion of the course the students will:

• Know how to display data in figures such as pie-charts, bar charts, and histograms.
• Understand the purpose of measures of central tendency, dispersion, and association and be able to calculate them.
• Understand the concept of a probability distribution and have a basic understanding of the meaning and use of the following distributions: normal, t, F, chi-squared;
• Know the meaning of a sample and be able to calculate and draw inferences from sample statistics.
• Have an understanding of time-series data.
• Understand the principles of estimation: bias and efficiency
• Be able to produce and test hypotheses.
• Understand covariance and correlation.
• Know the basics of the SPSS software program.

Module outline
The current year's module outline can be found via The School's website