Preface

0.1 Acknolwedgement

I would like to sincerely thank my professor and academic advisor Dr Howard M. Crowson (Statistics for the Real World, n.d.) (Mike Crowson - YouTube, n.d.) for providing me this wonderful opportunity to compile the resource materials in R along with providing me ample time weekly for consultation and support. You can also follow him here for his insightful lectures on basic and advanced statistial concepts and procedure.

I would also like to extend my gratitude to the authors of the textbook “An Introduction to Statistical Concepts” by Hahs-Vaughn and Lomax, 4th edition, and for providing a comprehensive resource that guided my exploration of various statistical concepts and methodologies. The textbook served as an invaluable reference, helping to gain a deeper understanding of the topics and apply them in practical examples using R programming. All the example data and text references are inspired from this textbook.

I also appreciate the developers and maintainers of the R language, R packages, and related tools for their dedicated work in providing a powerful and accessible platform for statistical computing and data analysis. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the creators of the bookdown(Xie, 2016), rmarkdown(Xie et al., 2020), ggplot2 (Wickham, 2016), psych (2023), lavaan (Rosseel, 2012), and all other packages used throughout the guide, which were instrumental in demonstrating various statistical concepts and procedures throughout this book and also useful for social science research.

0.2 Conventions Used in the Book

Code chunks will be presented in a typical Markdown format as such, with the code output below:

#This is a code block. 
("Hello world")
#> [1] "Hello world"

Italic

:Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions., some key highlights.

Tip

This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

Finally, here is the R version I am currently using:

version
#>                _                                
#> platform       x86_64-w64-mingw32               
#> arch           x86_64                           
#> os             mingw32                          
#> crt            ucrt                             
#> system         x86_64, mingw32                  
#> status                                          
#> major          4                                
#> minor          2.1                              
#> year           2022                             
#> month          06                               
#> day            23                               
#> svn rev        82513                            
#> language       R                                
#> version.string R version 4.2.1 (2022-06-23 ucrt)
#> nickname       Funny-Looking Kid

0.3 Example Data

All the example data I have used are form the textbook(Hahs-Vaughn & Lomax, 2020). It can be downloaded the official website of the textbook or from my github. Some of the example data compiled form other sources are only available in github.