Teaching statistics in the context of social foresight. An applied approach based on the use of an open-source software
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present the contents and the didactic approach that characterize, respectively, the “Introductory Statistics with R” and “Statistics and Foresight” courses of the Master in Social Foresight.
Design/methodology/approach
The two courses “Introductory Statistics with R” and “Statistics and Foresight” are designed to provide an introduction to quantitative methods in the social sciences with specific applications to social foresight. In particular, the first course introduces students to data analysis providing the necessary tools to study and represent socio-economic phenomena through graphical summaries and numerical measures. During the course, example applications based on the use of the open-source software R are shown. At the end, the students should be able to perform data management, conduct descriptive analysis of categorical and quantitative variables and analyze bivariate distributions. The subsequent course “Statistics and Foresight” presents the most efficient methods to make decisions in a context of uncertainty while visualizing the potential errors of wrong decisions and computing the probability of their occurrence.
Findings
This paper is a description of an interesting and promising way of teaching applied statistics in social sciences.
Practical implications
With the main aim of learning the correct use of statistics, specific attention is devoted to the use and interpretation of the aforementioned methods rather than to their theoretical aspects. Even in the second course, an important role is played by the treatment of real data by the use of the R software.
Originality/value
This paper attempts to systematize a method of teaching statistics based on the practical use of open-source software.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. They are also greatly grateful to Rocco Micciolo for all his help in improving the quality of the paper.
Citation
Giuliani, D., Dickson, M.M. and Espa, G. (2015), "Teaching statistics in the context of social foresight. An applied approach based on the use of an open-source software", On the Horizon, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 140-148. https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-02-2015-0010
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited