Statistical Programming with R: New Opportunities for Social Work Researchers

R is a programming language that can be used to retrieve and manage data, conduct statistical analyses, and create highly customizable and interactive data visualizations.  Although R is one of the most common software applications for conducting statistical analysis, it is rarely used among social work researchers.  R has a reputation that it can be challenging to learn.  However, it has a level of flexibility and capability that cannot be matched by other off-the-shelf statistical packages.  And, unlike other statistical packages, R is open-source software, so it is available at no charge. R is also becoming increasingly popular for text analysis and natural language processing, making it a potentially useful tool for qualitative researchers.   

The purpose of this workshop is to provide an overview of the R programming language, with the ultimate goal of demystifying the learning process and demonstrating the power of R.  Workshop participants will be introduced to:

• The R programming language and the freely available integrated development environment (IDE), Rstudio;  
• Freely available resources and suggested strategies for learning R, and ways to integrate R into the work flow of social work research;  
• Strategies to connect with the online R community to obtain freely available assistance on solving R-related problems; 
• Latest R-related technologies for creating highly customizable and interactive visualizations;
• Procedures of web scraping and the use of APIs to collect data from social media and open government data sources.