My name is Melissa Wolf, and I'll be your TA. I'm a 5th year PhD student working with Andy Maul. I'm interested in the design, validation, and analysis of self-report surveys.
Between 2010 and 2019, I exclusively used point and click software (SPSS) for data analysis. I only began using R during spring quarter of 2019, and I'm mostly self taught. I had no coding or programming experience prior to 2019.
- If any of this coding stuff seems insurmountable, I promise you: it isn't. The reason that I know it isn't is because I am somehow doing it.
- Yes, it's worth it.
This is the first time the 214 sequence has been offered using R, so there will inevitably be some bumps along the road. Please be patient - I'm learning along with you!
Unless you are doing something incredibly specialized, there will likely be at least 10 different ways and/or packages to get the same solution. I tend to use the tidyverse suite of packages for basic data wrangling, but that doesn't mean you have to! Feel free to use whatever packages or code makes the most sense to you. And, please share it with us so that we can code vicariously through you!
When in doubt, Google is your friend. If you get stuck, I'm happy to try to help you debug your code. To figure out what's going wrong, I will probably type your error message and/or query into Google and end up clicking a link that most likely goes to the stackoverflow website where your question has already been asked and answered by someone much smarter than me. I encourage you to try that first!