Publisher Description

This book provides a narrative of how R can be useful in the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly.  It can serve as a textbook and reference manual for students and independent researchers who wish to use R for the first time or broaden their skill set with the program. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that students and researchers in other fields should find it accessible and useful as well.  By the end of the first seven chapters, an entry-level user should be well acquainted with how to use R as a traditional econometric software program. The remaining four chapters will begin to introduce the user to advanced techniques that R offers but many other programs do not make available such as how to use contributed libraries or write programs in book details how to perform nearly every task routinely associated with statistical modeling: descriptive statistics, basic inferences, estimating common models, and conducting regression diagnostics. For the intermediate or advanced reader, the book aims to open up the wide array of sophisticated methods options that R makes freely available. It illustrates how user-created libraries can be installed and used in real data analysis, focusing on a handful of libraries that have been particularly prominent in political science. The last two chapters illustrate how the user can conduct linear algebra in R and create simple programs. A key point in these chapters will be that such actions are substantially easier in R than in many other programs, so advanced techniques are more accessible in R, which will appeal to scholars and policy researchers who already conduct extensive data analysis.  Additionally, the book should draw the attention of students and teachers of quantitative methods in the political disciplines.

Back Cover

Political Analysis Using R can serve as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate students as well as a manual for independent researchers. It is unique among competitor books in its usage of 21 example datasets that are all drawn from political research. All of the data and example code is available from the Springer website, as well as from Dataverse 7910/DVN/ARKOTI). The book provides a narrative of how R can be useful for addressing problems common to the analysis of public administration, public policy, and political science data specifically, in addition to the social sciences more broadly. While the book uses data drawn from political science, public administration, and policy analyses, it is written so that students and researchers in other fields should find it accessible and useful as well. Political Analysis Using R is perfect for the first-time R user who has no prior knowledge about the program. By working through the first seven chapters of this book, an entry-level user should be well acquainted with how to use R as a traditional econometric software program. These chapters explain how to install R, open and clean data, draw graphs, compute descriptive statistics, conduct bivariate inferences, and estimate common models such as linear and logistic regression. This portion of the book is ideal for undergraduate students, graduate students, or professionals trying to learn R in their spare time. This book also can be useful for an intermediate R user wishing to develop additional skills within the program. The last four chapters of the book introduce the user to advanced techniques that R offers but many other programs do not make available. Topics in these l ast chapters include: using user-contributed packages, conducting time series analysis, conducting matrix algebra, and writing programs in R.

Table of Contents

Obtaining R and Downloading Packages.- Loading and Manipulating Data.- Visualizing Data.- Descriptive Statistics.- Basic Inferences.- Linear Models and Regression.- Diagnostics.- Generalized Linear Models.- Using Libraries to Apply Advanced Models.- Time Series Analysis.- Linear Algebra with Programming Applications.- Additional Programming Tools.

Feature

Uses use all political data in the examples Dedicates an entire chapter to data management with R and one that emphasizes how a user can manage and analyze time-dependent data Appeals to the self-taught first-time R user, who perhaps has already been trained to use other programs but wants to understand and take advantage of the relative benefits R has to offer Provides an author-created Dataverse containing example datasets used in the analysis

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