Software and Support

NlsyLinks and Examples for R

The NlsyLinks R package contains utilities and kinship information for behavior genetics and developmental research using the NLSY. The development (and directions for installing it) are located in a GitHub repository.

For beginners, the most helpful documents are:

• Package documentation
• Vignette of estimating ACE models with the NlsyLinks package
• Vignette for extracting NLSY data
• NlsyLinks FAQ

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Examples for SAS

Because the links are distributed in a variety of file formats (including as non-proprietary CSVs), the are accessible by all statistical software. The NLSY and BG concepts and basic programming are fairly consistent across languages, so the R examples should be roughly translatable into different statistical platforms.

Here’s a SAS example that covers the basics. If you have a need for a different example, or a different language, feel free to request it in the ‘Other Software’ section in our forums. We would like to know what examples of platforms are the most useful to the potential users of the links.

• SAS Example

NlsyLinksDetermination in C#

The NlsyLinksDetermination repository contains the C# code that manipulates the NLSY data to produce the relatedness values. If you’re only interested in the R package (and not how the relatedness coefficients were determined), then please see the NlsyLinks package described above.

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Support Forums

Our support forums are intended to cover all aspects of this project, not just software. The top-level forums are:

• Open Discussion: General discussion
• Package Development: Discussion & questions about developing the NlsyLinks package
• Applied Research: BG and other applied research, including downloading kinship links
• Package Usage: Discussion & questions about using the NlsyLinks package
• Other Software: Discussion of using the links in SAS, Mplus, OpenMx, etc