One of the things I’ve become slightly obsessed with in recent years is moving my data analysis away from SPSS and over to R. And if I’m obsessed with something, you can be damn sure I’ll be inflicting this on my students too. For the past three years, I’ve embedded R into my From Cell to Society module, which explores biopsychosocial interactions in health. That makes it a great space for working with large, real-world datasets.
As part of the module, students work with a pared-down version of the Scottish Health Survey and use regression analysis to test a biopsychosocial theory of their own design. To support this, I’ve written a companion Quarto book that walks students through the key skills of data wrangling, visualisation, and analysis in R. It’s inspired by the excellent #psyteachr resources used at the University of Glasgow, but tailored to our own teaching context, datasets, and assessments.
You can explore the book for yourself at https://richclarkepsy.github.io/NS7154_25/. It’s open for anyone to use, borrow from, or adapt for your own teaching and learning. I hope it proves a useful companion on your coding journey.
Richard M Clarke (PhD) 