The use of statistics in social sciences

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose this paper is to review some of the statistical methods used in the field of social sciences. Design/methodology/approach – A review of some of the statistical methodologies used in areas like survey methodology, official statistics, sociology, psychology, political science, criminology, public policy, marketing research, demography, education and economics. Findings – Several areas are presented such as parametric modeling, nonparametric modeling and multivariate methods. Focus is also given to time series modeling, analysis of categorical data and sampling issues and other useful techniques for the analysis of data in the social sciences. Indicative references are given for all the above methods along with some insights for the application of these techniques. Originality/value – This paper reviews some statistical methods that are used in social sciences and the authors draw the attention of researchers on less popular methods. The purpose is not to give technical details and also not to refer to all the existing techniques or to all the possible areas of statistics. The focus is mainly on the applied aspect of the techniques and the authors give insights about techniques that can be used to answer problems in the abovementioned areas of research.

Keywords

• time series
• statistics
• sampling
• social sciences
• count data
• non-parametric
• multivariate
• statistical modeling
• bayes