Learn to love wrangling your data: A pragmatic introduction to R

R is a powerful, free (and open-source) programming language that is gaining enormous traction, particularly in the social and behavioural sciences. This community growth has resulted in the release of hundreds of add-on packages that automate or simplify pain points in the research pipeline (e.g., data manipulation; model fitting; text processing). Learning R can dramatically improve your data processing efficiency and expand your capability to manage complex research questions and datasets. However, the process of starting to learn R from scratch can be daunting.

This FOWI Academy session will introduce R at a high level (i.e. conceptual). It will help researchers who have no R experience understand how to get started learning R, and importantly, provide motivation to do so. The session will begin with a brief overview of the language and common beliefs about R and programming. Next, a range of R features will be explored, referring to specific…