Day 1 – The tools
Day 1 is about R, the IDE, and the kind of document that takes an analysis from data to finished report. It opens on why any of this matters, with the evidence on how often findings hold up and with five analysts of one claim, whose disagreement could be diagnosed because each of them submitted code that runs. It ends with the workspace running, one small task written three ways, and a rendered document of your own.
| Work through | What you do | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Slides, day 1: the credibility talk and SCORE | What social science is for, false positives and forking paths, the red-card study, why ‘replication’ names three operations, what open research proposes, and the three SCORE studies. | Session 1, 90 minutes |
| Slides, day 1: Multi100 and the toolchain, with Positron, RStudio and VS Code and Quarto and reproducible documents as companions | The forest plot of the five analyses, with a column for the software that each analyst used, then the toolchain and each layer in turn: languages, editors, plain text and the render pipeline, packages, version control, archives and licences. | Session 2, 90 minutes |
| Setup, then slides, day 1: the R tutorial, in your workspace | Install R and an IDE if you have not, download the workspace zip and run R/check_setup.R until it prints OK. The help page lists the common failures. Then ten slides worked live: R in one slide, getting data in, inspecting the data, working with rows and columns, model formulas, fixed effects with fixest, reading what comes back, plotting with ggplot2, causal graphs in R, and common error messages. |
Session 3, 90 minutes |
| Getting started with R, sections 6 to 10, and Quarto and reproducible documents | The pipe read left to right and one task written three ways, then the grammar of graphics built up until you can read the class chart; then what a .qmd file is and what rendering does, chunks and their options, figures, tables and cross-references. Render one document of your own. Finish by starting the browser lab once and reading the exercise overview. |
Session 4, 90 minutes |
By the end of the day you have R working in your IDE, one small task written in three dialects, a rendered Quarto document of your own, and the claim you will work on tomorrow read once.