[R] R for psychology

[Jonathan Baron]

For those new to this list, I point out that Yuelin Li and
I have drafted an introduction to R for psychology, trying
to emphasize the things the psychologists usually do.  It
is at
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/rpsych.pdf
and
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/rpsych.htm
Because it is a draft, with frequent changes, we have not
yet asked for it to be placed in the CRAN page.  We welcome
suggestions for changes.

One thing I want to add to it is a discussion of Error() in
analysis of variance, once I understand it better myself.

On the topic of R for psychology, I should point out that
the two biggest gaps I see in what R can do are manova and
factor rotation.  Prof. Ripley pointed out recently that
"the various multivariate test statistics" are "not difficult
to write if you know the formulae and have a need," but this
leaves out the fact that most psychologists would be hard
pressed to find the formulae and even harder pressed to figure
out how to write functions in R.  Sad but true, even though
this sort of test is very common in some fields of psychology.
(In their defense, most of these people studied these tests
at some point and understand them, and have not bothered to
learn the formulae because they know they can rely on SPSS,
Systat, or SAS to do it for them.)  It is possible that the
multilm package might do some of what is needed, but I haven't
checked yet.

As for factor rotation, the same comments apply.  Jon Baron

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jbaron
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