Introduction to Social Analysis

Data analysis is a powerful tool to investigate many important and interesting questions about societies and human behaviour. Policy decisions, your Netflix movie recommendations, or targeted advertisements on social media all rely on making sense of data. This course introduces students to basic skills of data analysis, statistical inference, and programming with a focus on applying these skills to questions in social sciences, politics, and media. Anyone can learn statistics. Graduates who can demonstrate skills in data analysis are highly valued by employers. Such skills are in demand in a wide range of sectors - public policy, public health, political campaigns, news media, business, journalism, law, communication, and information technology to name a few. This course aims to provide students with practical experience analysing and interpreting data. We will use powerful R programming language and open-source statistical software RStudio, both are employed routinely across many industries in many countries. The course requires no programming or coding experience.