About this book

This text is the primary resource for an undergraduate Political Science data analysis course. Rather than requiring a statistics text, this text combines all of the information you need in one document – an introduction to statistics, an introduction to political behavior and a guide to interpreting statistical output. This document is a work in progress, so let me know if you have ideas about organization or content or if you notice errors. I included links and references to a number of articles and other sources that demonstrate how data are used in social science and journalism. If you see interesting quantitative work online or in print, let me know so I can incorporate it.

The course is designed to acquaint you with the basic statistical techniques used by practicing social scientists, particularly a statistical model known as linear regression. Each chapter of this text covers about one to two weeks of material. The plan is for you to use this text as you work with the statistical output that you will use for the assignments.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The text is open source, so can copy the source code from GitHub and edit the text to make it your own. This site is static, but built from the RMD files you can see if you click on the “View book source” icon in the Table of Contents.

The right-hand pane “View source” links also take you to the source code for that chapter.