Analysing Criminological Data (21072)

Year: 2
Term: 1
Number of ECTS credits: 4
Student hours: 100

Syllabus

Descriptive statistics are a fundamental tool for analysing social reality. Statistical data appear constantly in the media, specialist reports, academic work, etc., either in the form of tables of numbers or explanatory graphs which summarise a great deal of information about the characteristics, structures and tendencies of social phenomena or individual behaviours.  They also enable us to relate two variables and so help us to explain, for example, which people may be most inclined to commit crimes or to be crime victims. Good criminologists need to know how to use descriptive statistics to be able to create information and interpret it correctly and thus make the right decisions. The course uses data and cases which are typical of the criminology field in applying concepts and techniques and statistical analysis software (SPSS) is used to work with the data.

Section 1. INTRODUCTION

  1. What are statistics used for?
  2. Data exploration: types of variable and measurement levels
  3. Data bases

Section 2. MEASURES OF CENTRAL TENDENCY AND POSITION

  1. Characteristics and properties of measures of central position
  2. Measures of central tendency: mean, median and mode
  3. Measures of position: quartiles, deciles and percentiles

Section 3. MEASURES OF DISPERSION

  1. Characteristics and properties of measures of dispersion
  2. Variance and mean deviation
  3. Pearson's coefficient of variation

Section 4. MEASURES OF SHAPE AND REPRESENTING DATA ON GRAPHS

  1. Measures of shape: asymmetry, kurtosis and concentration
  2. Representing data on graphs
  3. Detecting atypical cases (outliers)

Section 5. BIVARIATE ANALYSIS

  1. Introduction to bivariate analysis
  2. Two qualitative variables: contingency tables
  3. One quantitative and one qualitative variable: comparing means
  4. Two quantitative variables: dispersion, correlation and regression diagrams