Preface

These notes are based on weekly tutorial sheets I developed for a postgraduate social science course in 2020 to complement weekly lectures and online seminars. They were written in R Markdown, using the bookdown package.1

The core texts we used were Fox and Weisberg (2019), An R Companion to Applied Regression (Third Edition) and Healy (2019) Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction – both fabulous for learning applied statistics using R. The main aim of these tutorials is to help people understand the books.

All the datasets used are available in CRAN packages, e.g., car; however, I think it helps to learn how to read in csv files, so that is what I ask readers to do. It’s easy but fiddly, e.g., because Windows hides file extensions by default so users don’t always know what files are really called. All the necessary files are linked in each chapter.

I have included exercises which all come with solutions; to hide these, simply use the scrollbar to ensure that they are off the edge of the visible part of the screen…2

Feedback welcome.

Creative Commons Licence
Using R for social research by Andi Fugard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  1. The GitHub repository is over here.↩︎

  2. I originally used the .tabset attribute to hide answers; however, it doesn’t work for bookdown.↩︎