• Instructor team:
  • Ji Ma (Primary Instructor, maji@austin.utexas.edu)
  • Felipe Antequera (Instructor of Statistics and Teaching Assistant, felipe.antequera@utexas.edu)
  • Joycelyn Ovalle (Teaching Assistant and Grader, joyce.ovalle@utexas.edu)
• Weekly session: TH 9:00AM-12:00PM, SRH 3.122 (See schedule page for details)
• TA/Office hours: SRH3.276
  • Tuesday: 3pm-5pm (Joyce)
  • Wednesday: 9am-11am (Felipe)
  • Thursday: 2pm-4pm (Ji)
  • Thursday: 3pm-5pm (Joyce)

Overview

Data crunching is hard, applying data crunching methods to empirical social science studies is harder. This course has three purposes:

1. Understand basic quantitative and qualitative empirical analysis methods.
2. Able to conduct the analysis manually and with software packages.
3. Know how to apply these analysis methods to answering research questions from a research design perspective, and know how to assess the quality of an empirical study.

Required textbook: Meier, K. J., Brudney, J. L., & Bohte, J. (2014). Applied Statistics for Public and Nonprofit Administration (9th edition). Cengage Learning.

Bibliography of all readings

Where to get the textbook:

• UT Co-op Textbook
• Previous versions are fine as long as the course content is covered. If the contents are substantially different from the 9th edition, you can ask your classmates for help, or use the University Library’s service.

Grading

See a list of Assignments

• A >= 95%, A- >= 90
• B+ >= 87%, B >= 83%, B- >= 80%
• C+ >= 77%, C >= 73%, C- >= 70%
• D+ >= 67%, D >= 63%, D- >= 60%

Assignments

See assignment page for details.

Policies

• Mental health: The instructor urge students who are struggling for any reason and who believe that it might impact their performance in the course to reach out if they feel comfortable. This will allow the instructor to provide any possible resources or accommodations. If immediate mental health assistance is needed, call the Counseling and Mental Health Center (CMHC) at 512-471-3515. You may also contact Bryce Moffett, LCSW (LBJ CARE counselor) at 512-232-4449 or stop by her office hours-Wednesday 1-2 pm SRH 3.119. Outside CMHC business hours (8a.m.-5p.m., Monday-Friday), contact the CMHC 24/7 Crisis Line at 512-471-2255.
• University Policies
• License for Open Education: This syllabus and all course content created by the instructor, TA, and students are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.