POSC/SOCI 6388: Data Analysis for Social and Criminological Research

Just Plain Data Analysis teaches students statistical literacy skills that they can use to evaluate and construct arguments about public affairs issues grounded in numerical evidence. The book addresses skills that are often not taught in introductory social science research methods courses and that are often covered sketchily in the research methods textbooks: where to find commonly used measures of political and social conditions; how to assess the reliability and validity of specific indicators; how to present data efficiently in charts and tables; how to avoid common misinterpretations and misrepresentations of data; and how to evaluate causal arguments based on numerical data. With a new chapter on statistical fallacies and updates throughout the text, the new edition teaches students how to find, interpret, and present commonly used social indicators in an even clearer and more practical way.

A practical tutorial covering how to leverage RStudio functionality to effectively perform R Development, analysis, and reporting with RStudio. The book is aimed at R developers and analysts who wish to do R statistical development while taking advantage of RStudio functionality to ease their development efforts. Familiarity with R is assumed. Those who want to get started with R development using RStudio will also find the book useful. Even if you already use R but want to create reproducible statistical analysis projects or extend R with self-written packages, this book shows how to quickly achieve this using RStudio.

Mastering R has never been easier Picking up R can be tough, even for seasoned statisticians and data analysts. R For Dummies, 2nd Edition provides a quick and painless way to master all the R you'll ever need. Requiring no prior programming experience and packed with tons of practical examples, step-by-step exercises, and sample code, this friendly and accessible guide shows you how to know your way around lists, data frames, and other R data structures, while learning to interact with other programs, such as Microsoft Excel. You'll learn how to reshape and manipulate data, merge data sets, split and combine data, perform calculations on vectors and arrays, and so much more. R is an open source statistical environment and programming language that has become very popular in varied fields for the management and analysis of data. R provides a wide array of statistical and graphical techniques, and has become the standard among statisticians for software development and data analysis. R For Dummies, 2nd Edition takes the intimidation out of working with R and arms you with the knowledge and know-how to master the programming language of choice among statisticians and data analysts worldwide. Covers downloading, installing, and configuring R Includes tips for getting data in and out of R Offers advice on fitting regression models and ANOVA Provides helpful hints for working with graphics R For Dummies, 2nd Edition is an ideal introduction to R for complete beginners, as well as an excellent technical reference for experienced R programmers.

This book is a collection of recipes that will help you learn and understand RStudio features so that you can effectively perform statistical analysis and reporting, code editing, and R development. The first few chapters will teach you how to set up your own data analysis project in RStudio, acquire data from different data sources, and manipulate and clean data for analysis and visualization purposes. You'll get hands-on with various data visualization methods using ggplot2, and you will create interactive and multidimensional visualizations with D3.js. Additional recipes will help you optimize your code; implement various statistical models to manage large datasets; perform text analysis and predictive analysis; and master time series analysis, machine learning, forecasting, and so on.