Introduction to R for Data Analysis

The open source software package R is free of charge and offers standard data analysis procedures as well as a comprehensive repertoire of highly specialized processes and procedures, even for complex applications. In addition to providing an introduction to the basic concepts and functionalities of R, we will go through a prototypical data analysis workflow in the course: import, wrangling, exploration, (basic) analysis, reporting.

Course leader

Jan Schwalbach is a postdoctoral researcher in the team Archiving at in the department Data Services for the Social Sciences at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
Dennis Abel is a member of the team “Survey Data Augmentation” at GESIS.

Target group

Participants will find the course useful if they want to use R to wrangle, explore, visualize and analyse their data.

Prerequisites:
- prior experience with data analysis, basic statistics, and regression
- experience with using other statistical packages (e.g., SPSS or Stata) is helpful, but not a requirement

Course aim

By the end of the course participants will be:
- comfortable with using R and RStudio,
- able to import, wrangle, and explore their data with R,
- able to conduct basic visualizations and analyses of their data with R,
- able to generate reproducible research repots using R Markdown.

Credits info

4 EC
- Certificate of attendance issued upon completion.
Optional bookings:
The University of Mannheim acknowledges the workload for regular attendance, satisfactory work on daily assignments and for submitting a paper of 5000 words to the lecturer(s) by 15 October at the latest with 4 ECTS (70 EUR administration fee).

Fee info

EUR 500: Student/PhD student rate.
EUR 750: Academic/non-profit rate.
The rates include the tuition fee, course materials, the academic program, access to library and IT facilities, and coffee/tea breaks.