LEARN HOW TO ANALYZE QUANTITATIVE DATA USING IBM SPSS STATISTICS WITH DR.LYDIAH WAMBUGU

Research primarily focuses on searching for knowledge to improve the quality of life of the phenomena. Researches conducted in different fields can be different in methodology but every research is based on data which is collected, analyzed and interpreted to find solutions to the problems. Statistics therefore becomes significant in research. Statistics is a body of mathematical techniques or processes for gathering, organizing and interpreting numerical data. Because most research yields such quantitative data, statistics is a basic tool of measurement, evaluation and research.
Appropriate application of the use of statistical methods involves providing answers to the following questions (Best and Khan, 1998):
a) What are the facts that need to be gathered to provide the necessary information to answer the research questions or to tests the hypotheses?
b) How is the data to be collected, gathered, organized and analyzed?
c) What assumptions are to be employed that underlies the statistical methodology?
d) What conclusions can be validly drawn from the analysis of the data?
Response to these questions are normally a challenge to majority of postgraduate students. Most of them are not well grounded in research methodology, data analysis techniques, statistical assumptions and presentation of the findings.

The purpose of this course is to equip participants with knowledge and skills on quantitative data analysis and develop proficiencies to enable them to manipulate SPSS software. This course will enable the participants to analyze data using SPSS and make meaningful inferences from the SPSS output that is relevant to the research problem. This is a hands on course and is divided into 4 modules. Module 1 is on Introduction to Data Analysis, Module 2 is on Introduction to SPSS Environment, Module 3 is on Descriptive Statistics and Module 4 is on Inferential statistics.