Data Science for Psychologists (ds4psy)

The ds4psy and i2ds books, courses, and R package

The ds4psy book and course provide an introduction to data science that is tailored to the needs of psychologists, but is also suitable for students of the humanities and other biological or social sciences. The i2ds book and corresponding courses provide similar contents in a more extensive and updated form.

The audience of these materials typically has some knowledge of statistics, but rarely an idea how data is prepared and shaped to allow for statistical testing. By using various data types and working with many examples, we teach tools for transforming, summarizing, and visualizing data. By keeping our eyes open for the perils of misleading representations, the book fosters fundamental skills of data literacy and cultivates reproducible research practices that enable and precede any practical use of statistics.

The R package ds4psy primarily provides datasets, but also functions for data generation and manipulation (e.g., of text and time data) and graphics that are used in the book and its exercises. All functions included in ds4psy are designed to be explicit and instructive, rather than efficient or elegant.

Installation

The current release of ds4psy is available from CRAN at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ds4psy:

install.packages('ds4psy')  # install ds4psy from CRAN client
library('ds4psy')           # load to use the package

The current development version can be installed from its GitHub repository at https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy/:

# install.packages('devtools')  # (if not installed yet)
devtools::install_github('hneth/ds4psy')
library('ds4psy')  # load to use the package

Resources

This package and the corresponding books and courses are still being developed and are updated as new materials become available.

• The current version of Introduction to Data Science is available online at https://bookdown.org/hneth/i2ds/.

• A version of Data science for psychologists is available online at https://bookdown.org/hneth/ds4psy/.

• The current R package ds4psy is available at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ds4psy.

These books and courses were originally based on the classic textbook:

• Wickham, H., & Grolemund, G. (2017). R for data science: Import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data. Sebastopol, Canada: O’Reilly Media, Inc. (available online at https://r4ds.had.co.nz/)

but provide more base R and less tidyverse content.

• For ds4psy sources, there are two GitHub repositories to be distinguished:

  • The repository for the ds4psy book is https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy (with an additional suffix _book).

  • The repository for the ds4psy package is https://github.com/hneth/ds4psy.

About

If you find these materials useful, or want to adopt or alter them for your purposes, please let me know.

@Manual{ds4psy,
  title = {ds4psy: Data Science for Psychologists},
  author = {Hansjörg Neth},
  year = {2025},
  organization = {Social Psychology and Decision Sciences, University of Konstanz},
  address = {Konstanz, Germany},
  note = {R package (version 1.1.0, September 12, 2025); Textbook at <https://bookdown.org/hneth/ds4psy/>.},
  url = {https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=ds4psy},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.7229812}
}