PSK 221 - Statistical Methods in Psychology I

The aim of this course is to enable students to comprehend fundamental statistical concepts, types of distributions, measures of central tendency and variability, normal distribution, hypothesis testing, and basic parametric and non-parametric tests, and to interpret this knowledge within the context of scientific research. Students will develop statistical thinking skills and gain basic competencies in analyzing and interpreting data.

This course covers the fundamental concepts of statistics, including the definitions of population, sample, and statistics. It introduces different types of variables, levels of measurement, and scale types. Students learn how to organize data using frequency distributions and how to represent data with various types of graphs. The course also includes measures of central tendency such as mean, median, and mode, as well as measures of variability including range, quartiles, percentiles, mean absolute deviation, variance, standard deviation, and coefficient of variation.

Further topics include the characteristics of the normal distribution, the concept of linearity, and the transformation of raw scores into standard scores (z-scores). The course also explains the logic of hypothesis testing, including null and alternative hypotheses, and explores related concepts such as Type I and Type II errors, degrees of freedom, and confidence intervals. Finally, students are introduced to basic parametric and non-parametric statistical tests and their appropriate usage in data analysis.

Gravetter, F. J., & Wallnau, L. B. (2017). Statistics for the behavioral sciences (10th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Howell, D. C. (2013). Statistical methods for psychology (8th ed.). Wadsworth.

Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2019). Using multivariate statistics (7th ed.). Pearson

Field, A. (2018). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.