Preface

This book accompanies the “Survey Research Datasets and R” workshop delivered for the 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference. Many thanks to ACSPRI for having us, and to the workshop attendees for participating.

The R packages covered in this book are the result of uncountable hours of hard work by the R community, and all are freely available and released under open source licenses. The work we do would not be possible without them!

License

Creative Commons Licence

This work, as a whole, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Datasets

We chose to use a real life survey dataset for demonstration purposes. The majority of examples throughout use data from NORC at the University of Chicago’s 2018 General Society Survey.1

The online data examples use publicly available data from the Tidy Tuesday project, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government.

A very heartfelt thankyou to the people and organisations advocating for open data release and doing the work to make this data publicly available.

About the author

Danny Smith is a Senior Data Scientist at the Social Research Centre. Danny has worked as a survey programmer, analyst and data scientist in the survey research industry for 10 years.

His main interest and expertise is in research systems architecture, building systems that support automation of data workflows and processes and associated tools. He is an avid R user and supporter of free and open source software.

You can find him on GitHub (https://github.com/gorcha/).

  1. Smith, Tom W, Peter Marsden, Michael Hout, and Jibum Kim. General Social Surveys, 1972-2014↩︎