R for Social Scientists: Setup

Setup instructions

R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install R before you install RStudio. Once installed, because RStudio is an IDE, RStudio will run R in the background. You do not need to run it separately.

After installing both programs, you will need to install the tidyverse package from within RStudio. The tidyverse package is a powerful collection of data science tools within R see the tidyverse website for more details. Follow the instructions below for your operating system, and then follow the instructions to install tidyverse.

Windows

If you already have R and RStudio installed

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed

macOS

If you already have R and RStudio installed

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed

Linux

For everyone

After installing R and RStudio, you need to install the tidyverse package.

{r eval=TRUE, message=FALSE, purl=FALSE} download.file("https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/11492171", "data/SAFI_clean.csv", mode = "wb")