EGM101: skills toolbox#

EGM101: Skills Toolbox is designed to introduce first-year geography, environmental science, and marine science students to a variety of skills related to research in these areas of science. It covers data gathering (such as mapping, questionnaires, interview techniques, focus groups, and social media), data summary and statistical analysis, and the use of software packages for working with different kinds of data.

The module is broken into four sections:

  1. Spatial Mapping (Weeks 1 - 4)

  2. Quantitative Skills (Weeks 5 - 8)

  3. Survey Design and Qualtiative Skills (Weeks 9 - 10)

  4. Social Media Data Analysis (Weeks 11 - 12)

The material below is part of the Quantitative Skills section of the module, and covers the basics of statistical analysis. The practical exercises introduce the use of Excel and SPSS for data presentation and analysis, covering basics from calculating descriptive statistics through hypothesis testing.

week

lecture theme

practical theme

5

introduction to quantitative skills

computation, summary statistics, and graphing in excel

6

correlation and regression

summarizing and graphing data in spss

7

probability

correlation and regression in spss

8

hypothesis testing

hypothesis testing using spss