Data Science With R for Psychologists and Healthcare Professionals

This introduction to R for students of psychology and health sciences aims to fast-track the reader through some of the most difficult aspects of learning to do data analysis and statistics. It demonstrates the benefits for reproducibility and reliability of using a programming language over commercial software packages such as SPSS. The early chapters build at a gentle pace, to give the reader confidence in moving from a point-and-click software environment, to the more robust and reliable world of statistical coding. This is a thoroughly modern and up-to-date approach using RStudio and the tidyverse. A range of R packages relevant to psychological research are discussed in detail. A great deal of research in the health sciences concerns questionnaire data, which may require recoding, aggregation and transformation before quantitative techniques and statistical analysis can be applied. R offers many useful and transparent functions to process data and check psychometric properties. These are illustrated in detail, along with a wide range of tools R affords for data visualisation. Many introductory statistics books for the health sciences rely on toy examples - in contrast, this book benefits from utilising open datasets from published psychological studies, to both motivate and demonstrate the transition from data manipulation and analysis to published report. R Markdown is becoming the preferred method for communicating in the open science community. This book also covers the detail of how to integrate the use of R Markdown documents into the research workflow and how to use these in preparing manuscripts for publication, adhering to the latest APA style guidelines.

Christian Ryan is Senior Lecturer in clinical psychology in the School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork (UCC). He maintains his clinical practice as a chartered clinical psychologist, working primarily with children and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). He has published a range of peer-reviewed articles in the area of disabilities, adult mental health and psychometrics. The current focus of his research is on the interaction between alexithymia and autism, with a view to improving emotion recognition and regulation interventions.

Christian is the placement coordinator for the doctoral programme in clinical psychology at UCC, and is involved in all aspects of the course, including selection, teaching, research supervision, curriculum development and placement evaluation. He is also the Academic Director of the ASD Studies courses at UCC. He joined the university in 2017 after many years working in front-line services, both as a psychologist and psychology manager.

Christian served as an elected Council Member of the Psychological Society of Ireland (2014-2017); he is a full member of the Division of Clinical Psychology and a former member of Heads of Psychology Services Ireland (HPSI).