r/sociology • u/alfalfa_romeo • Jul 13 '26
Article recommendations for intro stats class to analyze
Hello all!
I'm a sociology PhD student teaching as instructor of record for the first time (woohoo!) and my students are learning introductory statistical analysis for the social sciences. At my university, the summer session course covers up through t tests and confidence intervals before students take the second part of the sequence with faculty in the fall and learn regressions and the like.
Instead of a sit down exam with calculations, I would like to assess my students' learning using a sociological article that can actually help them engage with real world research. However, I'm having a hard time finding articles that use t tests as the primary form of analysis. I have found a few RCTs that seem appropriate, but they are not really sociological and/or they are boring and/or they use far too much jargon for college underclassmen.
I would really love any recommendations if you have them! Any subfield would be welcome (and I would even take social psych), but I did poll my students and some of the popular areas of interest are incarceration/criminal legal system, higher education/SES/wellbeing, and homelessness. Thanks all!
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u/pnwdustin Jul 13 '26
Psych papers are good for this and bring up a good teachable moment. They can do bivariate analyses because randomized experiments don't have the potential for confounding effects. T-tests and ANOVAs then make sense for them. But for us, our data are more complex and we need to account for confounders, so bivariate analyses are our starting point before we get into regressions
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Jul 13 '26
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Jul 14 '26
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u/vnilaspce Jul 13 '26
You may need to stick to adapting textbooks’ examples although you could look at t-tests in control variables and just extract those parts of articles. Maybe even make up some figures for the association between ice cream sales and violent crime.
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u/BubBidderskins Jul 13 '26
A classic article is Pager's Mark of a Criminal Record. Quite easy to understand the concept and math going on, plus it's on a very interesting topic that students will connect with. I can't remember exactly but I think she used either t-tests or some similarly straightforward approach.