ABSTRACT
One really good way of explaining how the world of public affairs works is to measure social phenomena that have importance to governance of the public sector. Effective descriptions are powerful: they give insight to what is happening with policies and programs. This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this part of the book. The part covers the topics of coding and displaying data, as well as an introduction to the basics of descriptive statistics and guides how to code and present data. It explores the basics of setting up research projects and data collection efforts to the process of identifying and testing relationships for key factors that explain how programs and policies work and what impact they might have. The part explains how to think about probability, how to formally test hypotheses, and how to assess bivariate relationships by using measures of association for nominal, ordinal, and continuous measures.
