K300 is a basic statistics course for criminal justice majors.  The
primary emphasis in the course is on understanding the use and
interpretation of statistical techniques.  By the end of the class
you will be familiar with the most common statistical techniques
used in the field.  We begin by covering topics such as frequency
distributions, measures of central tendency, and measures of
dispersion.  We then address relationships between variables,
focusing on correlations, t-tests, f-tests (ANOVA), Chi-square
analyses, and multiple regression analyses.  We will focus on which
statistical technique is most appropriate to use given a particular
type of data.  We also will spend considerable time on interpreting
the outcomes of the statistical procedures.  In brief, the class
will be guided by the following questions:

How do I best analyze these data?
What statistical test is most appropriate to conduct, given these
data?
Once I have an outcome, what does it mean?
How do statistics tell me about what I really want to know?

Generally, our class meetings will be structured such that the first
half of our session will be devoted to discussing new material. The
second half of our session will be devoted to application and
practice through assignments on the computer using an actual
dataset.  SPSS will be our primary computer software program.

The goal of the class is for statistics to be approachable to you,
so that you can read the results of original research and understand
the study and its findings.  Hence, we will focus more on the
conceptualization of research and the understanding of statistics
than on the mechanics of computations.

Required Text
Bachman, Ronet & Paternoster, Raymond. (2004). Statistics for
Criminology and Criminal Justice. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Class meeting:  8:30 - 11:30 daily

***** THIS CLASS MEETS FIRST INTENSIVE SESSION ****

Instructors:  Cindy McNair and Vinod Kumar Thichempully Krishnadas,
criminal justice department