PADM 5857 - Introduction to R Programming

Fall. 0.5 credits. Letter grades only.

Enrollment limited to: EMPA students.

C. Hess.

This course is an introductory overview of the R programming language as it is applied to social science research, specifically data management and descriptive statistics. Through the fourteen (14) modules of this course, you will learn essential skills for getting started with the open-source R programming language in the context of social science research and policy analysis. These technical skills will be taught through accessible applications of real world data to pressing social policy issues like inequality, COVID-19, and criminal justice.

Outcome 1: Students will demonstrate how to navigate RStudio, write code that follows R syntax and style conventions, and diagnose and correct code if it has error.

Outcome 2: Students will demonstrate understanding of what basic data structures are and how they map onto ideas like variables and data sets from social science research, compute descriptive statistics, with or without grouping, and manipulate and visualize data using the tidyverse libraries.

Outcome 3: Students will estimate and make predictions from descriptive linear regression models.