Felipe Osorio made the above video to help people use the General Social Survey and R to answer research questions in social science. Go for it!
Meanwhile, Tom Smith reports:
The initial release of the General Social Survey (GSS), cumulative file for 1972-2012 is now on our website. Codebooks and copies of questionnaires will be posted shortly. Later additional files including the GSS reinterview panels and additional variables in the cumulative file will be added.
P.S. R scripts are here.
Really, Really excellent video! This kind of step-by-step talk-through is exactly what we need — it’s often difficult to present data cleaning in a way that doesn’t swamp a newcomer, but you’ve done a great job here.
One package I’ve found extremely useful, that I think could work nicely here, is plyr — the ddply command is really great for carryout split/apply/combine steps all at once.
Thanks for posting!
This is certainly very good and useful but I’m surprised that anybody could think it is helpful to have some music playing all the time.
The background music makes it very difficult to follow the content. This could be an issue especially for non native speaking North Americans and viewers above student age. Could Felipe Osorio possibly post a version without the accompanying musak? It would be much appreciated.
I can ask Felipe to re-release it with lower music volume. I think that a little bit of music is good, in that people often seem uncomfortable watching a video with no music at all.
In a similar vein, Anthony Damico has a plethora of scripts to suck US survey data (including the GSS but also the ACS, CPS, SIPP, NHANES…) into R. They’re available at http://www.asdfree.com/. It’s an incredible resource for the SASless.
Nice Hawaiian shirt!
Is the R script available somewhere?
Yes, see P.S. added.
ugh, i’m sorry to be an internet troll but i think these scripts in their current form are wrong? you are not accounting for the complex sample survey design appropriately – felipe keeps loading the `survey` package but does not use any of the functions. please review my GSS-specific R scripts to see how it should be done.. or at least get statistics that exactly match http://sda.berkeley.edu ..i don’t think these do?
http://www.asdfree.com/search/label/general%20social%20survey%20%28gss%29
see the “replication” script on that page that matches the PDF containing output provided to me by the folks at berkeley
Anthony:
Thanks—we’ll take a look.
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