In this section you will find a collection of useful links to help you study and search for adequate research methods and statistics.
- The Web Centre for Social Research Methodshas the following on offer:
- An online book about applied social science research methods
- An online statistiek adviseur
- An online book about setting up and running simple simulations
- Materials for learning to use structured concept maps
- Online tutorials about the selection of the correct research method - Free eBooks:
- Understanding Simulations (after filling in some data, it can be downloaded for free) - Open Source and Freeware Statistische Software:
The most used software in the social sciences is SPSS. It is however an expensive programme (free to use for OU students of course). A very good alternative with more visual aids is SAS JMP (cheap licences for scholars. You have to send them an email). Also quite a lot of open source software packages are available that can be downloaded and used for free. Most of them are harder to use because they work on the command line. However, the most powerful package, called R, can compete easily with SPSS and JMP in terms of computing power and number of algoritms implemented. A list of freely available statistical software can be found here.