Basics in R for people who are afraid of computers
Rik Vosters
Doctoral School of Human Sciences (DSh)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Click the green 'CODE' button and chose 'DOWNLOAD ZIP' to download all the files to your computer. Then unpack the ZIP archive and open the "_workshop - script.R" file in RStudio.
This course will offer a gentle introduction to R, especially (although not exclusively) aimed at researchers in the human sciences who are not particularly tech-savvy or who do not have any experience programming. We will first deal with basic operations, data structures and programming in the R language, and then move on to working with sample data. We will deal with basic descriptive statistics, as well as paramatric and non-parametric inferential statistics. In addition, we will pay ample attention to data exploration and data visualization.
The course will be relatively slow-paced, so that also people who have no experience in programming can follow along. Also, we will spend a fair share of our time in class practicising the concepts learned, so students can try to familiarize themselves with the material at their own pace.
This course should provide you with a solid basis which you can use to then further read up on and specialize in the types of analyses you need for your own research. During the course, we will also discuss resources and strategies on how to independently find out more information on particular types of analysis which are not covered in this basic course.
After this course, you should have a basic understanding of the workings of R, and you should be able to use it to load your own data and carry out basic graphical and statistical explorations on your data. Also, you should have acquired sufficient background knowledge in order to know what the possibilities are in terms of more advanced analyses, and where you can find the necessary resources to delve into those sorts of analysis on your own.
No previous experience with R is required, although researchers are welcome to take the course as a refresher. Some basic knowledge of descriptive and very basic inferential statistics (e.g. correlation, t-tests, etc.) is recommended.
Important: you are advised to bring your own laptop computer to the course, with the R package (https://cran.r-project.org) and the visual interface RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com) already installed. If this is a problem, contact the course instructor in advance.
This course will deal with:
- An introduction to working with R and RStudio
- Data structures, data importation and data manipulation (both base package and Tidyverse)
- Basic programming functions which can be used to carry out common, repetitive tasks (e.g. loops, writing your own functions, etc.)
- Some basics of working with textual data in R
- Data exploration and descriptive statistics (e.g. mean, medians, measures of dispersion, etc.)
- Introduction to data visualization (e.g. barplots, scatterplots, histograms, etc.), both with the base package and with Tidyverse
- Basic parametric and non-parametric inferential statistics (e.g. tests of independence, correlation and linear regression, etc.)
Note that this course is not an introduction to statistics. It assumes that researchers already have a basic familiarity with intro-level statistical concepts and tests (e.g. correlation, t-tests, etc.), but it will teach researchers how to carry out, interpret, and visualize the results of such tests in R.
Online material (scripts, notes and exercises) available on https://github.com/rikvosters/Basics-in-R
Prof. Dr. Rik Vosters
Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies
Faculty of Languages and Humanities
Vrije Universiteit Brussel