17.872 -- Quantitative Research Methods I: Introduction
Course Description: Introduction to elementary statistics and its application in social sciences. Teaches students how to read and interpret the quantitative literature in various subfields of political science and public policy. Students develop elementary statistical computation skills and learn to use a statistical computing package.

This class is at the Graduate level
Instructor: S. Ansolabehere
Open courseware website: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Political-Science/17-872Spring2004/CourseHome/index.htm
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor

Insider's Wisdom

The course provides an overview of theoretical statistics with a modest amount of probability, it introduces students to data analysis using STATA, and covers univariate problems (proportions, means and variances, and anova), tables, and basic regression. Students also learn bootstrapping and simulation. It is taught from the frequentist perspective (rather than the Bayesian).

Examples come primarily from political science and economics, with some other social sciences thrown into the mix.

This course leads into the next course in the political department sequence (17.874), and a new third semester course (17.876).

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