Statistics

Introduction

This course provides an introduction to statistical thinking and forms part of the bachelor’s programmes in marketing as well as organisation and management. The course focuses on the application and interpretation of statistical methods, and covers how data can be collected, described, and analysed, as well as how statistical methods can be used to generalise from a sample to a population.

Particular emphasis is placed on conceptual understanding and the interpretation of analysis results, often based on outputs from statistical software, while relatively little emphasis is placed on mathematical calculations. Through practical examples, the relevance and application of statistics within marketing and management studies are illustrated. Active use of statistical software is a central element of the course.

Course content

• Data collection. Variables and levels of measurement.
• Descriptive statistics: measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion, covariance, and graphical representations.
• Basic probability concepts: the concept of probability, outcomes and sample spaces, events, and simple probability distributions, including calculation of expected value.
• The normal distribution and the t-distribution. Sampling distributions and the central limit theorem.
• Confidence intervals for one and two means as well as for proportions.
• Hypothesis testing for one and two means as well as for proportions.
• Simple linear regression, including inference in the form of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for the regression parameters.
• Selected statistical tests, including the chi-square test for association between two categorical variables.
• Ethical issues related to the collection, analysis, and communication of statistical data, including data protection, representativeness, and responsible interpretation of results.
• Active use of statistical software.

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.