Analysing survey data

Overview

Questions

• What are some descriptive statistics of my data set that I can compute in R?
• How do I calculate the number of participants in my survey data?
• How do I calculate the mean age of participants in my survey data?
• How do I found out what age are the youngest and oldest participants in my survey data?
• How do I compare scores of participants based on their musicianship?
• How do I carry out a t-test?

Objectives

• Calculate the number of participants in your survey data
• Calculate the mean age and standard deviation of participants
• Determine the number of musicians and non-musicians that took part in your survey
• Calculate the average scores of musicians and non-musicians separately
• Carry out a t-test to find out if musicianship had a statistically significant effect on how participants scored on their tasks they had to carry out

Key Points

• Use mean() and sd() to calculate the mean and standard deviation of a variable
• Use min() to identify the minimum value of a particular variable
• Use max() to identify the maximum value of a particular variable
• Include the na.rm = TRUE argument in functions when possible for the calculation to ignore missing values in the data
• Use filter() to subset your data by a specific variable
• Use the t.test function with the following syntax t.test(DependentVariable ~ IndependentVariable, data) to compare whether the means of two groups are statistically different or not