Abstract
For conducting research, nurses typically use commercial statistical packages. R software is a free, powerful, and flexible alternative, but is less familiar and used less frequently in nursing research. In this paper, we use data from a previous study to demonstrate a few typical steps in exploratory data analysis using R. A step‐by‐step description of some basic analyses in R is provided here, including examples of specific functions to read and manipulate the data, calculate scores from individual questionnaire items, and prepare a correlation plot and summary table.
Gregor Štiglic
Associate Professor and head of Research Institute
My research interests include predictive models in healthcare, interpretability of complex models.
Roger Watson
Professor of Nursing
Leona Cilar Budler
PhD
My research interests include mental health, nursing research, and health informatics. Specific areas of interest include adolescent mental health, psychometric testing of questionnaires, questionnaire localization, and quantitative data analysis.