Data management is the most critical component of data analysis and comprises the vast majority of the work. Without properly managed data, statistical analysis is inaccurate, if not impossible. Therefore, knowing how to manage data and conduct quality control checks on managed data is essential for data analysts in any discipline. The goal of this course is to provide hands-on, project-based instruction in data-management techniques using industry standard statistical software. Students will be provided with research questions and data sets and will be required to manage the data to prepare it for statistical analysis and provide basic reports, descriptive statistics, and graphs. In addition, they will be introduced to SQL, a powerful programming language that can interface with statistical software to conduct more complex and efficient data management. Students in this course will learn how to use statistical software to evaluate, clean, and manipulate data sets to get the data ready for statistical analysis. In addition, they will be capable of using basic SQL commands to manipulate data. They will also learn best practices for data management and basic quality-control checking using summary reports, descriptive statistics, and graphing. |