Data analysis for beginners in R

Course overview

Hannah Metzler

2025-01-31

Who am I?

• PostDoc at MedUni Vienna and the Complexity Science Hub
• Psychology, Neuroscience, Data Science
• Research topics: social media, misinformation, mental health, suicide prevention

Intention

• For beginners
• Encourage you to start writing your analyses as code
• Reproducibility & transparency for yourself and others
• Break things down to lower the barrier
• A big welcome to all your doubts and questions!
  • Please interrupt any time
  • Especially if you feel your question might be stupid
• Making mistakes is essential for learning to code.

Course overview

• January 31 & February 6, 13 & 20 2025,
• 10am-12pm, short break from 11h to 11h10
• All materials: https://hannahmetzler.eu/R_intro/ (or at the Source on Github)
• Lesson 1: Getting started
• Later lessons: Data visualizations, data wrangling, basic statistics
• 8 hours are not much - so I focus on keeping you all on board, you can easily continue learning online.

Before we start

• Have all of you managed to install R & Rstudio?
• How do you feel about learning R in one word?
  • Shy/excited/under-confident/brave/bored?
• Previous experience in 1-2 words?
  • none/very little/little?

To follow the course

• Open R studio
• Either Zoom or lesson materials on the side
• Write code yourself as we go along to practice.
  • You’ll learn more if you get errors!
• If in hurry: Code fields from materials can be copied by click