1 About

Welcome to this guide! We, Vas (c/o 2021) and Daniel (c/o 2022), are two sociology alumni from Santa Clara. One of the highlights of our time in the department was our RAship with Dr. Molly King. We loved our time learning R under Prof. King’s guidance and are excited to pass on our learnings to support future RAs with their research. We hope this guide will help you get excited and set-up to conduct sociological analyses in R!

1.1 Why you should learn R

R is a free, open-source statistical software. It’s widely used in academia & research and is also used in many industries for data analysis, visualization, and GIS. If you don’t know other programming/coding languages yet, R is a great primer as it translates well to Python and will help you develop data science and computational social science skills. Because R is open-source, it makes our scientific pursuits of reproducibility, transparency, and open science much easier. Last but not least, there is a large community of users and developers who contribute to improving R, so it’s very likely that other users have already encountered the errors and roadblocks that might line your path as you learn this language.

1.2 Usage

This guide will set you up to conduct research with Dr. King in R, but it assumes some basic knowledge of R. Here are some resources to familiarize yourself with R syntax before you use our guide. You don’t have to go through all of them, but pick 1-2 to get started.

1.2.1 Notes

Vas and Daniel started learning R in 2020, and this guide was last updated in 2023. R is a powerful language, so there is all sorts of analysis you can leverage it for. To name a few, spatial research (e.g., mapping and GIS), textual analysis, and network analysis can all be performed using R. This guide covers one small part: survey analysis, specifically, analysis of large-scale survey data that is weighted. Fortunately, the datasets we worked with during our RAships with Dr. King had already been meticulously cleaned, but it’s possible you’ll have to clean and tidy data on your own. We hope the resources above can help you get started here.

R is open-source, so this means there are always new updates and features added to the software to ensure that it keeps up with the times. It’s possible that some of the code in this guide (or content in the resources listed above) is outdated. With a little googling, you should be able find tons of other learning materials online. You’re always welcome to email vasudha.037@gmail.com with questions, corrections, or other musings.