MY464     
Critical Data Literacy for Media and Communications

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The course is intended for students with no previous experience of quantitative methods or statistics. It is designed to equip students to understand and critically reflect on reporting of commonly encountered quantitative analyses as presented, for example, in news reports, annual reports, opinion polls and academic articles in the field of Media and Communications. It covers the foundations of descriptive statistics and statistical estimation and inference, including tests of statistical significance, via a range of univariate and bivariate data analyses, and multiple linear regression. The seminars and practical exercises provide introductory skills training, applying these techniques to real social science data and interpreting their results.

6 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Self-guided practical exercises and readings to be completed before seminars for discussion, and Moodle (online) quizzes to support learning.

A course pack will be available for download online to support the technical content of the course. Many introductory statistics books are also available; we particularly recommend Alan Agresti and Christine Franklin (2009) Statistics: The Art and Science of Learning from Data, and Alan Agresti and Barbara Finlay (2009, 4th edition) Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences. Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot’s (2008) The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers provides an indication of ‘critical’ element of the course content.

Exam (100%), duration: 120 Minutes in the January exam period