Course Information

Hello and welcome to Level 1 Psychology at the University of Glasgow! This is the data skills course book for Psych 1A and Psych 1B and will contain almost everything you need for the data skills element of the course. We say almost because there’s some stuff that we need to host on Moodle for admin reasons, for example, resources related to the assignments, however, you should keep this book very close. In fact, it would be a very good idea to save a bookmark for this page to your phone and computer!

0.1 How to use this book and the walkthrough videos

For most chapters of this book there is an associated walkthrough video. These videos are there to support you as you get comfortable using R, however, it’s important that you use them wisely. You should always try to work through each chapter of this book (or if you prefer each activity) on your own and only then watch the video if you get stuck, or for extra information.

For many of the initial chapters, we will provide the code you need to use. You can copy and paste from the book, however, we strongly encourage you to type out the code by yourself. This will seem much slower and you will make errors, but you will learn much more quickly this way.

Additionally, we also provide the solutions to many of the activities. No-one is going to check whether you tried to figure it out yourself rather than going straight to the solution but remember this: if you copy and paste without thinking, you will learn nothing.

Finally, on occasion we will make updates to the book such as fixing typos and including additional detail or activities and as such this book should be considered a living document. When substantial changes are made, new walkthrough videos will be recorded, however, it would be impossible to record a new video every time we made a minor change, therefore, sometimes there may be slight differences between the walkthrough videos and the content of this book. Where there are differences between the book and the video, the book should always be considered the definitive version.