Week 1 Introduction and Research Design

Introduction to the course and basics of geographical research design.

1.1 What We Cover this Week

This week will review the course syllabus and some basic research design concepts and concepts of statistical analysis. This will lay the groundwork for data analysis tools which we will cover in subsequent weeks.

1.2 Readings

Chapter one in online textbook

Key sections in readings:

• What are statistics?
• Descriptive vs. inferential statistics
• Levels of measurement
• Distributions
• Summation notation

1.3 Lab

Attend your lab session on Friday possible to briefly meet your TA instructor and to get the course software installed on your computer. We will be using an open source software package called R and R-Studio for most of the work in this course. R-Studio is one of the most widely used software packages in data science, statistics and data analysis more generally. Many employers in the environmental field now greatly value skills in R - so even though the learning curve can be a little steeper, it is well worth the effort to learn this approach to data analysis.

As a supplement to the lab materials, I highly recommend using YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R - which has lots of great information and resources for learning R. You can read chapter 2 for how to get it installed on your machine. The TA will verify everyone has a working installation of R on their machine in lab on Friday.