2024-09-18: General Update

In the Spring, we held a few meetings on various topics and also ran a workshop on latent variable modeling with the lavaan package, which was taught by Yves Rosseel (the author of the lavaan package) from Ghent University. The workshop was a great success and was well attended with over 36 participants.

However, attendance at the regular meetings has been quite low, so we are now reconsidering the format of the meetings. For the moment, we will have fewer regular meetings and will meet online via Zoom. If you would like to attend, please send an email to Wolfgang at <wolfgang.viechtbauer (at) maastrichtuniversity.nl> and I will give you the Zoom link. The next meeting will be on October 7th at 15:00.

2023-11-17: Workshop on Latent Variable Modeling

Over the course of the last meetings, we have made arrangements for the first workshop that is organized by the group, which will be a workshop on latent variable modeling with the lavaan package. The workshop will take place March 8th, 2024, and will be led by Yves Rosseel, Professor of Data Analysis at Ghent University, who is also the author of the lavaan package. For further details about the workshop (and registration information), see here. This is a great opportunity to learn about this general class of models directly from the author of lavaan package, which is the de-facto standard R package for fitting such models.

2023-04-27: Quick Retrospective

So far, we have had a total of five meetings, in which we covered the basics of using R, looked at the use of ‘formulas’ in R syntax, discussed some general issues with project organizations, tried out some packages for creating a ‘Table 1’ for studies, examined some methods for categorical data analysis, and took a look at Quarto (a system for creating dynamic documents, reports, books, presentations, and entire websites that can contain R code and code for other languages like Python and Julia).

Anybody who would like to cover a particular topic or give a presentation is more than welcome to do so! Also, please make sure that potentially interested people know about the existence of the user group. If there is a newsletter for your research group/school or some other way of making announcements to your colleagues, then please make use of it, so that more people hear about the group.

2023-03-02: First Meeting

We had our first meeting yesterday. Around 25-30 people showed up, with quite diverse backgrounds (some people are just starting out with R, others are already using it in their daily work). After a quick introduction round, we discussed a few topics:

  1. Remote participation: There are pros and cons to this, but we will try this out for the upcoming meetings. For now, this will involve that the person giving a presentation is running Zoom. If possible, we will try to organize a Meeting Owl for a slightly better experience. However, coming in person is strongly encouraged and the person giving a presentation can always opt-out of allowing remote participation. The link to the Zoom meeting will be announced via our Slack workspace (see below).

  2. Meeting structure: The first meetings will involve getting people new to R ‘up to speed’ (i.e., covering the basics). Then we will switch to a meeting structure where the first part of a meeting is dedicated to a presentation / discussion on a particular topic, followed by a more dynamic part where (a) newcomers can examine the materials from previous meetings on their own (and, as needed, with the support from more experienced members), (b) members can explore other topics, and (c) members can just mingle with like-minded individuals.

  3. Slack workspace: We will use Slack for communication. To join the workspace, send an email to Wolfgang at <wolfgang.viechtbauer (at) maastrichtuniversity.nl>.

After this discussion, we covered a bit of the basics of R (i.e., reading in data, data inspection, data preparation, and some standard statistical analyses). The materials can be found on the materials page.

Hope to see you at the next meeting!

Wolfgang Viechtbauer

P.S.: The room in which we are currently meeting is supposed to get renovated in the near future. This might mean that we will have to switch to a different room in case the renovations overlap with one of our meetings. Please keep an eye on the schedule where a change in room, if necessary, will be indicated.