Essential Mathematics for the Social Sciences is designed for first-year graduate students in quantitative social science programs who may not have taken a math course since high school, and lack confidence in their math abilities. It aims to break students’ reliance on using basic models in statistical software, and helps give them confidence to adapt models to their theories, to identify and address errors, and to truly understand how the software produces results. This book teaches the essential mathematical ideas that underlie important quantitative methods in the social sciences, with a particular emphasis on linear regression, advanced probability models, formal theory, and computer simulation. Jonathan Kropko works through applied problems, showing students how to solve them. Students who work their way through this text will acquire the confidence to genuinely engage with the topics in advanced quantitative methodology, instead of defaulting to learning a computer program.
