R for Sociology and Social work

Advanced Course for PhD Candidates Spring 2022, Credits: 3 ECTS.

Course Description

The course will cover the essential elements of using the statistical software R. The course aims to provide a basic orientation in reading data into R, data management, and descriptive statistics via summary measures and visualization. The course also introduces basic concepts of quantitative text analysis.

The course is a summer course and stretches over two weeks, August 15–26. The course includes self-study. The language of instruction is English.

Learning Outcomes

Upon accomplishment of the course, the participants are expected to show:

knowledge of the logic behind programming in R,
good ability to open, tidy and describe data in R,
skills to read and write basic statistical code in R, and
skills in how to use R for text-analysis.

Course Literature

The course literature will comprise of lecture notes, book chapters and articles.

We will use examples from the following books:

Imai, K., & Bougher, L. D. (2021). Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction. Princeton University Press.
Wickham, H. & Grolemund, G. (2017). R for Data Science. O'Reilly Media, Inc. https://r4ds.had.co.nz/

The Design of the Course

Teaching takes the form of a series of workshops and self-study. The workshops cover the introductory parts of using the programming language R in social science research using RStudio. In the self-study part, the students apply the programming language R to their research projects or data presented at the beginning of the course.

RStudio is available for free. Please get in touch with the service centre at the university to enable installing RStudio via software center on your computer.

The number of R users is large, and there are several ways to seek help when you run into programming issues. The following site provides guidance to get help within R as well as links to other helpful discussion forums that can provide help https://www.r-project.org/help.html.

Presence at the workshops is mandatory. Each workshop will last for 4 hours. Please notice that if a student for any reason misses more than two workshops, they will need to re-take the course on another occasion. The topic for each workshop will be announced later.

For more information, contact Johan Boberg.