PSY31008   Coding for psychologists   (10 credits)

Description

Managing large datasets is increasingly seen as a key skill by employers both inside and outside of academia. Best practice in this area often borrows from fields such as data engineering, where the ability to write code and understand programming principles is crucial. Students who complete this module will gain an understanding of these principles, and will learn the fundamentals of how to code using R, an approachable open source coding language commonly used in psychology, data science engineering, and  bioinformatics.   This module provides an introduction to processing and managing data sets with R, with a focus on processing data from psychological research. After collecting the data, both students and researchers can be overwhelmed by the huge amount of data and different files and are at risk to get lost in the many steps of preprocessing and analyses. In this module, students will learn how to organise and prepare data for the next steps of analyses. The module will teach fundamental coding principles, and cover how to develop routines for checking the plausibility and quality of data. By the end of the module, students will have acquired the knowledge to write a set of scripts and routines to preprocess empirical data sets from psychological research.

Reading List