Understanding Data in the Media

Data experts Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman discuss how data is used in today's digital society. They examine the enormous potential offered by big data, explain the new technologies that enable real ...

Dr Mark Taylor - Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute explains how to understand the use of small numbers in this excerpt from our new free, open online course 'Making S...

Dr Mark Taylor - Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute explains how to break down bigger numbers in this excerpt from our new free, open online course 'Making Sense of Da...

Data experts Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman discuss how data is used in today's digital society. They examine the enormous potential offered by big data, explain the new technologies that enable real ...

In this video, we hear from Joe Twyman, the Head of Political and Social Research for Europe, Middle East and Africa at YouGov (an internet-based market research company) about his experience of condu...

A sample is a subset of a population. It lies at the heart of survey research. It is sometimes called a ‘miniature of the population’, so the process of drawing a sample should maximise the similarity...

This is a phrase used in statistics to emphasise that a correlation between two variables does not imply that one causes the other. Just because two trends seem to fluctuate in tandem, that doesn’t pr...

Most reputable organisations will provide some level of information about the data they publish so that we can see how it was collected, who procured it, and for what purpose. Without this basic infor...

Measurement is how we quantify objects and events so that we can make comparisons among them. Being aware of the measures used in a dataset will help you determine the quality of the evidence....

What happens when a research question isn’t framed properly? You can end up with misleading conclusions.In this video, educator Andy Bell considers a recent news story and the research question (or qu...

We’ve started to get a sense of some of the different ways that the media uses data to make you think numbers are big or small, but sometimes, to understand the size of a number, we need to compare it...

Another way that the media uses data is to report change and risk - how much has something increased or decreased? If you start a particular behaviour, how much does that increase your risk of a parti...

It may sound like a silly question, but if we want to make sense of data in the media, then whenever we hear numbers quoted, one of the first things we should be asking is - is that a big number? If s...

Does 0.1% sound like a big number? Stripped of important context, it’s almost impossible to tell.Context is crucial in understanding whether numbers are big or not, particularly when it comes to perce...

Learn how to make sense of social statistics and economic data with this introductory course on quantitative social science.https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/media-dataIncreasingly, we’re bombarded ...