PUBPL 6002 - Statistical Packages for Public Policy

This course is designed to train advanced graduate students to examine policy issues and address policy research questions using three statistical software packages commonly used in the public and nonprofit sector; Excel, SPSS and R. The course is divided into two equal parts. The first part prepares students to use Excel and SPSS to examine, clean, label and merge data to answer pertinent public policy questions. The second half of the course introduces students to a workflow methodology for quantitative projects and teaches students how to use the R statistical programming language to explore and manage data, to model a quantitative project, and to communicate through visualization in R.