Chapter 01: Getting Started
[01a] Introduction
Topics
- How this site is organised
- Setting up R and RStudio
- How the course is designed
About this course
This site holds a full set of teaching materials for a graduate course in statistical methods. Everything is free to use: teach from it, adapt it for your own course, or work through it on your own.
The material is organised into five units, each containing three chapters, each containing two or three lectures. A lecture is sized to roughly ninety minutes. Every lecture has its own page section with slides, readings, and usually an assignment; Unit A lectures also have practice activities with answer keys.
Assignments are attached to individual lectures rather than to chapters, and each one stands alone. If a lecture is skipped, its assignment can be skipped with it and nothing else breaks.
Setting up
You will need two free programs, installed in this order:
- R — the language everything is written in
- RStudio Desktop — the environment you will actually work in
Once both are installed, open RStudio and run the install-packages.R script from this site. It installs every package used anywhere in these materials and skips anything you already have.
The first two chapters walk through RStudio, projects, and Quarto in detail, so there is no need to understand any of it yet.
How the course is designed
A few choices are worth stating up front, because they shape everything that follows.
- Estimation over testing alone. The emphasis throughout is on estimating effects and describing their uncertainty, not only on whether a p-value crosses a threshold.
- One modelling framework. Group comparisons, ANOVA, regression, and moderation are all presented as the same general linear model rather than as a catalogue of separate tests.
- Code you could hand to someone else. Analyses are written in Quarto documents so that the code, output, and prose stay together and can be re-run by anyone.
[01b] Working in RStudio
Topics
- R and RStudio
- Console
- Scripts
Readings
- Coding Basics — R for Data Science
- Comments — R for Data Science
- Scripts — R for Data Science
- RStudio IDE Cheat Sheet — Posit
Slides
*Note that you can click the three-line (hamburger) icon on the bottom-left of the slides to access a navigation menu. You can click inside the slides region and press the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to advance and reverse the slides and animations.