Using Data

Topic for 1/5 (Part 2)

Our empirical questions will always involve at least two key elements:

These elements of empirical questions correspond to components of the data we will use, which will appear in the format of spreadsheets. Below is one hypothetical data table.

A hypothetical data table with three households
Address Income Number of People
5462 Park St 54,896 2
4596 Ocean Ave Apt B 22,465 1
6831 River Dr 134,297 4

The unit of analysis in these data is a household. Each row represents one unit. It is typical that a row of your dataset will correspond to a unit of analysis. Each column contains a variable defined for every unit: the address of the household, annual the household income, and the number of people in the household.

Data in R

Next we will load these data into R.

library(tidyverse)
basicData <- read_csv("https://soc114.github.io/data/basicData.csv")

If you type basciData in your R console, you will see a printout of the data. In class, we will use these data to become familiar with the RStudio environment.

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