Face-to-face , second term, 30 hours of theory and 15 hours of exercises.

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The course is given in French, but the suggested bibliography and reading files may include some articles in English.

The course and the practical exercises aim to help students acquire the fundamental know-how in analyzing data in social sciences; it constitutes an initiation to multivariate analysis. By the end of this course, the students should be able:
- to determine the sort of problem-question for which the methods studied in class are relevant;
- to interpret the statistical analyses that call on these methods;
- to use wisely the main tools of descriptive statistics and of statistical inference studied in the “Statistics for social sciences” course and which will be recalled when learning the related SPSS commands.

This course is a continuation of the “Statistics for social sciences”, “Information for social sciences" and "Approach and methods of research in social sciences I" courses, which are therefore considered as prerequisites.

The course will first focus, through problem-question solving, on the construction and description of variables and on the interpretation of contingency tables used as means of testing simple hypotheses.

Then secondly, the course will study multivariate analysis of data. We will start by showing the underlying postulates of the investigated methods, the limitations of their use, the questions that they allow us to solve and then, we will explain how to interpret correctly the produced analyses.

The software used in class and during the exercises is SPSS.

The course alternates between lectures and commented examples (resolution of problems-questions); these lead the students to the exercise sessions (on a computer).

• Conditions of the final assessment:
The knowledge of the course will be assessed, according to the announced objectives, in a written examination. The proposed exercises will check the students' capability to grasp the methods' application conditions studied in class and to interpret correctly the analysis results, which will be presented to them.

• Conditions of the formative assessment:
During the lectures as well as the exercise sessions, a number of exercises will be presented to the students, allowing them to evaluate themselves.

• BERTHIER N., 1998, Les techniques d'enquête en sciences sociales, Paris, Armand Colin, pp.161-171 ; pp.185-198.
• BONMARIAGE J., 1975, Eléments pour une problématique technique de l'analyse descriptive, Université catholique de Louvain, Extrait de la thèse de doctorat non publiée.
• BRYMAN A. & CRAMER D., 1997, Quantitative data analysis with SPSS for Windows: a guide for social scientists, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 276-290.
• DODGE Y., 1993, Statistique. Dictionnaire encyclopédique, Paris, Dunod, pp.115-118.
• DOISE W., CLEMENCE A., LORENZI-CIOLDI F., 1992, Représentations sociales et analyses des données, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, pp.25-51 ; pp.109-139.
• FOX W., 1999, Statistiques sociales, Paris, Bruxelles, De Boeck Université, pp.105-107 ; pp.149-167 ; pp.194-201 ; pp.203-225 ; pp.227-252
• LORENZI-CIOLDI F., 1997, Questions de méthodologie en sciences sociales, Lausanne, Delachaux et Niestlé, pp.43-84.
• SPSS, 2003, SPSS Base 12.0 Guide de l'utilisateur, Chicago, SPSS Inc., pp.453-468 ; pp.481-487.

Didactic supports proposed to the students: a reading file including articles presenting the studied methods or articles related to them; a file including a questionnaire and results (output SPSS) of statistical analyses interpreted during the course.