Foundations of Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

These lecture notes were written with the aim to provide an accessible though technically solid introduction to the logic of systematical analyses of statistical data to undergraduate and to postgraduate students, in particular in the Social Sciences and in Economics. They may also serve as a general reference for the application of quantitative--empirical research methods. In an attempt to encourage the adoption of an interdisciplinary perspective on quantitative problems arising in practice, the notes cover the four broad topics (i) descriptive statistical processing of raw data, (ii) elementary probability theory, mainly as seen from a frequentist's viewpoint, (iii) the operationalisation of one-dimensional latent statistical variables according to Likert's widely used scaling approach, and (iv) the standard statistical tests of hypotheses concerning (a) distributional differences of variables between subgroups of a target population, and (b) statistical associations between two variables. The lecture notes are fully hyperlinked, thus providing a direct route to original scientific papers as well as to interesting biographical information. They also list many commands for activating statistical functions and data analysis routines in the software packages SPSS, R, EXCEL and OpenOffice.