Computer Knowledge and E-Skills

Following a guided approach through the different stages of the statistical survey, the course aims to provide students with basic knowledge and skills in the field of computer science and descriptive statistics.

1. What Statistics is and what it is used for
- Usefulness and uses;
- Definition;
- Basic concepts;
- The research question;
- Word processors and spreadsheets.

Digital skills involved
- Use Microsoft Word/Google Docs and Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets to produce a statistical survey.

2. Collecting data
- Data;
- Secondary data and sources;
- Primary data and sampling;
- Survey techniques.

Digital skills involved
- Use the mathematical, statistical, logic and text functions of Excel/Google Sheets for sampling;
- Consult databases and search engines (Istat, Eurostat, Google Trends, Google Dataset Search, Google Scholar):
- Design and implement digital questionnaires using Microsoft Forms/Google Forms;
- Design and implement chatbots using Landbot.io.

3. Organizing data
- Datasets, tables and graphs;
- Data distribution (frequencies, frequency classes);
- Organising qualitative data;
- Organising quantitative data;
- Graphs: do's & don'ts.

Digital skills involved
- Organize a dataset with Excel/Google Sheets and use pivot tables;
- Use Microsoft Word/Google Docs and Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets for a first description of data.

4. Synthesizing data
- Measures of central tendency, even for grouped data (mean, median and mode);
- Measures of dispersion, even for grouped data (range, average absolute deviation, variance, standard deviation, interquartile range; properties of the standard deviation and Čebyšëv's inequality);
- Skewness and kurtosis, even for grouped data (Pearson skewness index, first and second Pearson skewness coefficients, Fisher skewness index, Pearson-Fisher skewness coefficient, kurtosis index);
- Measures of position (z-score, quartiles);
- Outliers.

Digital skills involved
- Use the mathematical, statistical, logic and text functions of Excel/Google Sheets for data synthesis.

5. Analyzing data
- Univariate Analysis - The Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), boxplots;
- Univariate Analysis - How to describe a distribution;
- Bivariate Analysis - Correlation;
- Bivariate analysis - Simple linear regression.

Digital skills involved
- Use the mathematical, statistical, logical and text functions of Excel/Google Sheets for Exploratory Data Analysis and simple linear regression;
- Use BoxplotR to make a boxplot.

6. Drawing conclusions (and communicating results)
- Conclude the statistical survey;
- Communicating the results.

Digital skills involved
- Use Microsoft Word/Google Docs and Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets to process the statistical survey;
- Record, run and associate a macro with a button in Excel/Google Sheets.
- Creating visual content using Canva.