About Us
This web site is a distance learning tool developed at the University of Michigan in collaboration with several other institutions. For details on the contributing institutions, click on "Project Partners" on the menu to the left.
The web site is intended to be a stand-alone learning tool. It is not, however, a fully comprehensive course in statistics for the social sciences. Rather, we hope that the web site will allow students who have taken some introductory classes in quantitative social science to begin to actually use South African data to investigate policy issues. While we try to offer some instruction in statistics along the way, the web site is not a substitute for a more formal course.
Perhaps the ideal use of this web site is as a complement to an existing course. The web site is not intended to be specific to any particular discipline in the social sciences. Rather, we hope that economists, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and demographers will all find the site appropriate.
Most of the content of the site is found under the "Course Materials" page. There you will find the data sets around which the site is organized, the original survey forms, and a series of "Modules" that comprise a sequential course in using data to investigate issues of social policy in South Africa.
Project Objectives
- An introduction to household surveys: how and why they are done, the logic of sampling, overviews of the major household surveys available in South Africa, and how these surveys can be used to address policy issues with special attention to South Africa.
- An overview of basic descriptive statistics: frequency distributions, measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion and inequality, issues in generating statistics from survey data, and an introduction to regression analysis.
- A hands-on instruction in the analysis of survey data using statistical software (STATA) on microcomputers, reading and exploring data; creating graphs and tables; basic statistical analysis.
Project Partners
This project is possible through the collaboration of several institutions. The multi-year project is being funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The South Africa based part of the project is being conducted at the University of Cape Town The School of Economics, and the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) are the two units of the University of Cape Town working on this project. The U.S. based part of the project is being conducted at the University of Michigan. The Population Studies Center, a center of the Institute of Social Research, and the School of Public Policy are the two units of the University of Michigan working on this project. The data for this project have been collected by the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU).