Course outline

In this seminar students will learn programming in the statistical language R. In contrast to other statistical software packages such as SPSS or Stata, the R software environment is free and open source. R can be used for data analyses and visualization. The course is intended to give students an understanding of cleaning and preparing (survey) data for analyses, exploring (survey) data with graphics and summaries, and conducting linear regression analyses using R. The course will use a combination of short lectures, programming demonstrations, and assignments to teach programming skills. Students will become familiar with R and learn how to use R for their own data analyses projects. For the assignments, we will use the publicly available datasets to prepare and edit raw data, summarize and visualize descriptive information, and analyze and interpret data and findings.