Introduction

This free course, Prices, location and spread, examines aspects of the question:

Are people getting better or worse off?

The course concentrates on the statistical aspects of the question, focusing on statistics about prices. However, it is not the case that statistics can provide all the answers – or even the best answer – to the question of whether people are getting better or worse off. There are many non-statistical issues which are relevant and it is important to put the statistical approach in its correct perspective.

In the question, people does not refer specifically to you, the readers of the course, but to the whole of society in the UK. That is quite a big batch (more than 62 million in 2010, according to an estimate from the UK’s Office for National Statistics), consisting of men, women and children, living alone, in large or small households, or in institutions; some of them working, others unemployed, some retired and others still at school.

It is not possible, using statistical techniques, to provide a complete answer to this one question covering such a big theme, particularly an answer which is valid for all these people and their varied economic and social circumstances; data and techniques both have to be used with common sense. Instead, the aim of this text is more modest: to explore small batches of data relevant to the question (and relating to some individuals and groups in society), using basic analytical and graphical techniques. The sections in this course cover the following:

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course M140 Introducing statistics.