Data Science with R for Psychologists and Healthcare Professionals

This introduction to R for students of psychology and health sciences aims to fast-track the reader through some of the most difficult aspects of learning to do data analysis and statistics. It demonstrates the benefits for reproducibility and reliability of using a programming language over commercial software packages such as SPSS. The early chapters build at a gentle pace, to give the reader confidence in moving from a point-and-click software environment, to the more robust and reliable world of statistical coding. This is a thoroughly modern and up to date approach using RStudio and the tidyverse. A range of R packages relevant to psychological research are discussed in detail. A great deal of research in the health sciences concerns questionnaire data, which may require recoding, aggregation and transformation before quantitative techniques and statistical analysis can be applied. R offers many useful and transparent functions to process data and check psychometric properties. These are illustrated in detail, along with the wide range of tools R affords for data visualisation. Many introductory statistic books for the health sciences rely on toy examples – in contrast, this book benefits from utilising open datasets from published psychological studies, to both motivate and demonstrate the transition from data manipulation and analysis to published report. R Markdown is becoming the preferred method for communicating in the open science community. This book also covers the details of how to integrate the use of R Markdown documents into the research workflow and how to use these in preparing manuscripts for publication, adhering to the latest APA style guidelines.