Turn your Surveys and Trials into Insight with Sampling and Hypothesis Testing (12 Hours)

Course Details

Most organisations who conduct trials and surveys know how much it can end up costing in time & money. So how do you get the maximum amount of insight from the minimum amount of data to avoid overspending? The answer is to ensure that you use Statistical Sampling & Inference ideas and tools in both the design of your trial or survey and in interpreting results. Sounds easy, but only if your researchers are fully grounded in these concepts.

This 2-day course will introduce the ideas of statistical sampling & hypothesis testing and how it can be applied to the design of your trials and surveys. As always, we will use a mixture of stimulating discussions and real life case studies to help you understand and apply the following concepts. Each concept will be carefully explained, its relevance to trial & survey design highlighted and how the relevant calculations can be done in Excel.

Who should attend this course?

Our course is designed to help all researchers in all fields extract the maximum out of their trials and surveys. This is a must have course for all those who need to be fully conversant with the key statistical tools before undertaking a trial or survey.

Course details

The course will be delivered online over 2 days, Thursday 14th and Friday 15th July 2022.  Each day will start at 0930 and finish at 1700.  Our intention is to use Teams but we are happy to use Zoom if a majority of delegates prefer to use this.  Please state in your booking if you would prefer the course to be run on zoom.

The course fee is £800 including VAT per person. 

Course prerequisites

In order to get the most out of this course, participants will require:

1. A laptop with Microsoft Excel installed. A spreadsheet with the data to be analysed during the course will be emailed to you before the course.
2. Be comfortable with the main operations of Microsoft Excel such as entering data, producing line, bar & XY scatter plots and be able to use the data manipulation functions of Excel such as IF, VLOOKUP, MATCH, etc.
3. An understanding of  basic statistical concepts such as expectation, variance, distribution, correlation, probability & risk.

It is important to note that this course is not a training course in Microsoft Excel.  However, you will learn useful tricks and shortcuts with Excel during the course.

What you will learn?

Day 1 – You will learn about the key principles of sampling & measuring data, how to estimate sample size, choose a sampling method and calculate and interpret confidence intervals.

• The Survey Wheel and the key ideas of sampling & measuring
• What are sampling methods and how to choose the right one?
• How to calculate & interpret confidence intervals when comparing a single sample to a benchmark.
• How to calculate & interpret confidence intervals when comparing two samples.
• How to estimate the required sample size using OC Curves and Capability Analysis.

Day 2 – You will learn about what the terminology of hypothesis testing means, how to specify goals & objectives for your analysis, how to turn these into specific hypotheses to be tested and then how to interpret the results and draw conclusions.

• What are variables, factors & levels?
• Why are null & alternative hypotheses important?
• What are P-values and how do we interpret them?
• What are statistical tests (T-tests, F-tests, ANOVA, Chi-squared & Binomial tests) and how do we use them?
• What is the difference between a good and bad trial?

Throughout the course, there will be ample opportunities for you to practice the calculations in Microsoft Excel and to ask questions.  After the course, you will receive a spreadsheet explaining all the answers and demonstrating the relevant calculations.

Your course instructor

Nigel Marriott is an Independent Statistician and fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.  He has been running basic statistics courses aimed at non-statisticians for 20 years.  Feedback has consistently noted that Nigel has a rare ability to explain what looks like complicated statistics in a simple manner that makes it easy for you to understand and apply what you are learning.

Find out what previous course attendees think of Nigel.

Nigel also blogs extensively on topical statistical issues including sampling and hypothesis testing and you can find all his blogs here.

Other Training Courses in Statistics

We offer a wide range of statistical training courses covering numerous topics.  We provide in-house training as well as public courses like this one.  You can find out more details here.

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