Chapter 1 Introduction and Orientation

This is an online course book, designed for students on the Warwick Business School DBA Programme, who are taking the module ‘Introduction to Quantitative Methods’, taught by Professor Nick Lee.

The module is more accurately titled ‘Learning from Data (and) Science’, and consists of a set of in-person lectures, linked with these examples and additional expositions.

You can see to the left a list of the contents of the book. However, please note that these ‘chapter numbers’ do not refer to the specific lectures. Not all of the lectures use quantitative examples.

It is important to note that this module is not designed to teach you how to use R. The objective of the module is to help you learn how to use and interpret the results of quantitative social science research, understand the core principles of excellent quantitative social science, and also how to apply key principles of quantitative and scientific thinking into your own life and (where relevant) work.

This book is written in Markdown, using R and the bookdown package, and published online in HTML format. A full archive of all the R Code and data is available from Professor Lee on request, once the book is completed for the year.

This book is essentially a ‘live’ document, meaning that it is finalised for each year just before the module runs, but then modified for future runnings.

The current year is 2026, and the book is currently final for 2026

Please enjoy the book, and learn from it.

Feel free to email me with any questions or comments: