This course introduces students to the use of quantitative data in analyzing the criminal justice system. It serves as an introduction to the statistical methods used in applied social science research and furthers students' understanding of the role statistical analysis plays in planning and policy development. The course will review fundamentals of research, showing the interplay between the theory, the research, the statistical method, and the interpretation. Introduces the techniques of statistical analysis used for evaluation and policy purposes. Pertinent examples will be discussed including such topics as probability, statistical inference, significance testing, descriptive statistics, and multivariate analysis. Students who have not taken an introductory course in statistics within the past five years will be required to take a college-level statistics course as a prerequisite.  

Students completing this course will be able to: 

• Recognize and describe common forms of criminal justice data
• Describe and define basic statistical principles (e.g. data, units of analysis, variables, measurement, association) and explain their relevance to criminal justice inquiry
• Create and interpret tables, graphs and charts that describe statistical data
• Describe variable distributions using appropriate measures and tests
• Explain the concept of statistical inference
• Test hypotheses using common bivariate and multivariate analytic techniques
• Summarize the results from these analytic techniques in a written summary
• Summarize and critique journal articles which employ analytic techniques.