12-01, 15:00–16:30 (Australia/Sydney), Zoom Breakout Room 1
Although R began as a specialist statistical programming language, the R ecosystem has grown wildly over the past few years making it a viable general-purpose research environment across the whole research lifecycle.
Survey research datasets come from a diverse range of sources, often containing richer metadata than your average data frame. This workshop provides a practical demonstration of several packages for accessing and working with survey data, associated metadata and official statistics in R.
We will demonstrate:
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Working with external data sources from common statistical packages (SPSS, SAS, Stata, Excel) and their quirks
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Easily working with categorical data in R with the “labelled” R package
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Accessing external databases in an R native way using DBI and dbplyr
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Accessing publicly accessible data in R scripts via the web
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Resources for accessing official statistics data in R
Participants should have a basic working knowledge of R to follow along with examples, but beginners are also welcome.
Accompanying notes:
https://socialresearchcentre.github.io/r_survey_datasets/
Danny Smith is a Senior Data Scientist at the Social Research Centre. Danny has worked as a survey programmer, analyst and data scientist for 10 years.
His main interest and expertise is in research systems architecture, building systems that support automation of data workflows and processes and associated tools. He is an avid R user and supporter of free and open source software.