Overview

This tutorial is one of a series that accompanies the books An Adventure in Statistics (Field 2016) and Discovering Statistics Using R and RStudio (Field 2020) by me, Andy Field. This tutorial contains abridged sections from the books so there are some copyright considerations but I offer them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License,¹

• Who is the tutorial aimed at?
  • Anyone teaching from or reading Discovering Statistics Using R and RStudio or An Adventure in Statistics may find them useful.
• What is covered?
  • This tutorial looks at using RStudio to interact with R. It covers installing R and RStudio, the difference between them, a tour of RStudio, good RStudio workflow practices, installing and loading packages, and using R Markdown. It would be a useful tutorial to run at the start of a module, or alongside teaching based on Chapter 1 of Discovering Statistics Using R and RStudio or or An Adventure in Statistics.

Installing R and RStudio

This section looks at installing RStudio and R. The topics covered are:

• The difference between R and RStudio and how they work together
• Installing R
• Installing RStudio

Video tutorial

A quick tour of R Studio

This section takes a tour of R Studio. Topics covered are:

• The four panes of RStudio and changing their configuration
• Creating a new R Markdown document
• Getting help in R
• Changing the RStudio theme

Video tutorial

Working in RStudio

This section looks at good workflow practices in RStudio. The topics covered are:

• Using and creating R Studio project files
• Organzing your R Studio project folder
• Relative file paths
• Cuddling a spanial
• Creating a new R Markdown document
• Code chunks in R Markdown documents
• Loading data files

Video tutorial

Installing and loading packages

This section looks at installing and loading R packages. The topics covered are:

• R packages and the CRAN
• Installing packages using install.packages()
• Loading packages using library()
• Using a setup code chunk in R markdown
• Using the here package

Video tutorial

R Markdown

This section looks at creating documents using R Markdown. The topics covered are:

• What is R markdown?
• YAML (very briefly)
• Formatting text in R markdown documents
• Headings
• Bullet lists
• Emphasizing text (bold, italic, superscript, subscript)
• Inserting images/figures
• Inserting hyperlinks

Video tutorial

Getting data into RStudio

This section looks at how to use Microsoft Excel and Google sheets to enter data into RStudio. The video explains:

• What is tidy data?
• Entering data for independent designs using Excel/Google sheets and saving as a CSV file
• Entering data for repeated measures designs using Excel/Google sheets and saving as a CSV file
• Loading data from a CSV file into RStudio using readr::read_csv()

Video tutorial

Tables in R Markdown

This section looks at how to format tables in R Markdown so they knit into beautiful things rather than horrific vomitoriums of plain text. The topics covered are:

• Setting code chunk options to results = 'asis'
• Using the knitr::kable() function
• Creating a caption
• Setting the number of decimal places for a table
• Using the kableExtra package to ceate banded/striped tables

Video tutorial

References