This website has been designed to help undergraduates (in the Media School) to grasp the main foundation concepts that will be needed when dealing with numerical research data. Even if you feel that your mathematics is good, there will be specialist techniques unique to your discipline which you will still need to learn.

1. This learning aid is not intended to be a substitute for lectures or indeed for the possession of a good textbook!! Each Focus is outlined with the essential core features, it is then up to each student to " read around the topic" starting with the two (textbook and electronic) reading lists provided on the site.

2. Each Focus is dealt with in a slow, logical and progressive fashion. DO NOT ignore the 'stories' that are wrapped into many of the calculations; they are partly there to make the calculations feel more realistic and are taken from situations that you may well come across in your working career.

3. You may follow the Focus's in the order in which they were written or you may go directly to a particular topic that interests you.

4. DO NOT try to jump ahead too far, you will need to absorb all of the material in Focus's 1 - 11 before moving on to the more advanced techniques. If you are already competent in the basics, then use this material to explore and consider whether any 'deeper' analysis of your data would be helpful and / or enlightening.

5. It is possible that your individual course of lectures does not follow the same progression as laid out here but it will not differ greatly.

6. All the examples are taken from relevant, plausible and topical situations that any researcher, scientist or businessman might be expected to have to deal with. Be prepared to think up more 'real life' situations of your own. Each example is headed up by an image. Image association will help you to remember which test matches which example.

7. The worked and partially-worked examples are to show you how logical thought can be applied to 'real' environmental and 'workplace' projects. The intention is to show you also how good project management and design will help you to deliver documents that will stand up to rigorous scrutiny.

8. Always be willing to enter any data set into either EXCEL or SPSS. It is part of your training as a manager (in terms of professional skills) that you are familiar with both of these programmes. Many of the datasets have already been attached to the site via the SPSS data set index page.

9. Be prepared to experiment with any of the data sets provided. Simply open them and explore for yourself to see what inferences can be drawn.

10. Statistics is often viewed with trepidation by students but most of it is very logical as long as you take one step at a time.

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