Welcome to SABLE, Virginia Tech's Statistics Activity-Based Learning Environment for integrating statistics education into the Social Sciences curricula. The Learning Environment consists of interactive tutorials in which the student completes tasks that lead to an understanding of statistics principles and their application to social sciences data. Each tutorial employs visualizations of data and relationships and also allows the student to download and interact with data sets collected in the General Social Survey and others. The Learning Environment experience culminates in the student's use of the visualizations to analyze and draw conclusions from real data.

Note: To use these tutorials, you must have installed SUN's Java Plugin for your web browser.

About the SABLE project at Virginia Tech, supported by FIPSE

All files, sofware, and tutorials that make up SABLE are Copyright (c) 1997 1998 1999 Virginia Tech. You may use these programs under the conditions of the SABLE General License, which incorporates the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

CONTENTS

Click the for an overview of topics covered.

Introduction

Foundations Making Decisions Examining More Than One Variable

SUMMARY OF TUTORIALS

(*) Denotes an Interactive Exercise

How to Use SABLE

    Instructions for Using the SABLE Tutorials

Measurement Scales in Social Sciences Reseach

    Introduction
    Nominal Data
    Ordinal Data
    Interval Data
    Ratio Data

Measures of Central Tendency: Mean, Median, and Mode

    Introduction
    The Frequency Histogram
    Central Tendency
    Ways to Measure Central Tendency *
    Mean
    Median
    Mode
    Which Measure Should You Use? *
    Skewness ***

Sampling

    Introduction
    How can samples reveal information about a population? *
    Sample characteristics
    Randomness & representativeness *
    Sampling Protocols
    Central Limit Theorem
    Stratification *

Measures of Dispersion: Departures from Central Tendency

    Introduction
    Range *
    Percentiles & Related Characteristics **
    Variance & Standard Deviation
    Comparison of Range, Quartiles, and Standard Deviations
    Standard Distribution Scores, or "Z-scores" **

Measures of Dispersion: Departures from Normal Distribution

    The Normal Distribution
    Non-Normal Distributions
Hypothesis Testing
    Hypotheses about Populations
    Sampling and Testing Hypotheses **
    Type I Errors
    Type II Errors
    Sampling Distributions
    Standard Error
    Confidence Interval
    Critical Value
    Statistical Significance
    Null Hypothesis
    Alternative Hypothesis
    Non-directional Alternative Hypothesis
    The Researcher's Dilemma
    Fail to Reject
T-Distributions
    Estimating Standard Error
    Relationship Between the T-Distribution and the Normal Distribution
    Single Sample T-Test
    Independent Sample T-Test
    Paired T-Test
    Using the T-Statistic to Compare Regression Coefficients
Analysis of Variance
    Sources of Variation *
    Total Variation
    Variation Within Groups
    Variation Between Groups
    Analysis of Variance Table *
    Ratios Between SSs *
    The F-ratio and the F-distribution *
    One-Way Analysis of Variance (recap)
    Two-way Analysis of Variance *
    Recap and Summary
Cross Tabulations
    Correlation & Covariance
      Correlation *
      Units of Analysis in Frequency Distributions *
      Correlation and Standardized Distribution Scores *
      Correlation vs. Causation
      Correlation & Coefficient of Determination *
      Covariance *
    Linear Regression
      Relating Variables **
      Predicting Values for Variables *
      Assumptions of Regression Analysis *
    Multiple Regression

    This page last updated 07/07/2006.

    Feedback? Email shaffer AT cs DOT vt DOT edu!