Statistics for Policy Science: Slide Decks for a Fourteen-Session Course, with a Catalogue of the Materials

Abstract

Slide decks for Statistics for Policy Science, a fourteen-session course of 100-minute classes, aimed at researchers whose main field is not statistics — in public administration, political science, social psychology, management — who need the procedures common in their own discipline, as far as the sentence that appears in a paper. Every session works from a published, openly available paper and from a purpose-built R Shiny application. Each session follows the same four steps: learn the procedure with data bundled in R or in the application; convert the deposited data of a real paper; check whether the published values come back; write the reported sentence, starting from the draft the application produces. The applications write the numerical part of the report and leave the interpretation blank. Contents. A bundled ZIP of the decks for sessions 1–7 and 9–13; the deck for session 1 as a separate file; and a one-page outline giving the fourteen sessions, the materials each uses, and the DOI of every session record. Sessions 8 and 14 have no deck of their own: they are review sessions built around the students' own work. This record is a catalogue and a copy. The applications and their slides are deposited session by session, each with its own DOI; that record is the authoritative copy of a deck and the place where corrections are made. The ZIP here is a copy of the decks as they stood on the date in its file name, refreshed periodically rather than after every change. If a deck has been revised in its own record since that date, the record wins. Session 1 is the exception: it has no application of its own, so its deck is maintained here. The session records. Cronbach's alpha template (10.5281/zenodo.21926470), two-group comparison app (10.5281/zenodo.21868990), cross-tabulation app (10.5281/zenodo.20474808), logistic regression app (10.5281/zenodo.21774051), aesthetics simulator (10.5281/zenodo.22062427), propensity score materials (10.5281/zenodo.21883689), SEM and mediation analysis app (10.5281/zenodo.20621364), path diagram and lavaan syntax simulator (10.5281/zenodo.20650804), factor analysis app (10.5281/zenodo.21940643). The course has not been taught; these are materials, and no learning outcomes are claimed. Japanese translations of the slides exist but are provisional and are distributed only to enrolled students; the English decks are the version of record. Use of generative AI. The slide decks in this record were prepared with the assistance of Anthropic Claude, used for drafting, layout and the preparation of figures. All content was reviewed, edited and verified by the author, who takes full responsibility for it. License: CC BY 4.0. The session records carry their own licenses; the aesthetics simulator is released under GPL-3.0-or-later.