Introduction to Statistics for the Social Sciences (MA/BA) (Universität Luzern) (in Englisch)

20. Juli 2025

Statistics is an important skill in the social sciences for empirically testing our theoretical ideas. Statistics uses data to describe objects and ideas, and to draw conclusions about the population from random samples. If you are motivated to learn statistics and data science but feel insecure, this «Introduction to Statistics for the Social Sciences» is for you. The course is designed for beginners. The course emphasizes the application of ideas rather than mathematical proofs. As a student, you will learn the important statistical concepts while applying the learned knowledge using the statistical software R. R is open source and therefore free for everyone to use. If you are the type of person who wants to learn something without investing time, this course is not for you. To learn statistics it’s important to practice every week. There will be exercises in OLAT to practice and apply the skills.

The course is structured as follows: In the first part we describe data. To describe data, we learn what data is and how to read data into R, how data looks like and how we can recode data to get it on the right scale, we learn and apply different descriptive statistics and plot the data. We then learn about different distributions and probability theory as a prerequisite for inferential statistics: What can we learn from a sample about the population from which it was drawn? We then apply inference statistics to simple hypothesis testing and the linear regression model.