stevedata:
Steve’s Toy Data for Teaching About a Variety of Methodological, Social,
and Political Topics
{stevedata} is an R package full of toy data sets that
you may find useful for various purposes. Namely, I’ve created probably
over a hundred toy data sets along the way, either to riff on some topic
on my blog, show my students
something in one of my many
classes, or just to entertain myself. I had stuffed a lot of these
into {stevemisc},
but I want to keep that package mostly about the functions (and whatever
data are necessary for showing off the functions).
{stevedata} will have all my toy data going forward.
I anticipate two sets of R users may find these data useful. First, instructors may find these data useful for classes on a variety of topics, but prominently quantitative methods and international relations. Many of the toy data sets included in this R package are data I’ve acquired or assembled to teach about topics in quantitative methods or international relations in a reproducible way. Users should see my Github repositories for my classes on introduction to international relations, quantitative methods in political science, and foundations of social science research for public policy to see how I’ve used these data (or development versions of them). Topics here are diverse, including (but not limited to) carbon dioxide emissions over 800,000 years (as an illustration of climate change), coffee prices (as an illustration of the worsening terms of trade, the justifiability of bribe-taking (as an illustration of information-poor and discrete variables that a researcher may be tempted to treat as drawn from a normal distribution), the canonical case of illiteracy rates in the 1930 U.S. Census (as an illustration of an ecological fallacy), and many, many more topics.
Second, my students in these classes (but especially my methods
classes) should find this R package useful. I will also be having my
methods students (undergraduate and graduate) download this package to
work through problem sets in the R programming language. It’d be a
benefit to them (and less hassle/headache for myself) to have my
students download this package from CRAN rather than work through
potential curl issues by
installing through Github.
In almost all instances, each data set has an underlying code/script
that generates them. These are in a data-raw directory that
is (increasingly) included in the Github repository (but not the R
package).
This package is now on CRAN. You can download it as you would any other R package.
install.packages("stevedata")You can also install the development version of
{stevedata} from Github via the {devtools}
package. I suppose using the {remotes} package would work
as well.
devtools::install_github("svmiller/stevedata")The data set already has a lot to offer those who might be curious about its contents. You can do this to see what is in it.
data(package = "stevedata")You can also check the website for more information. There is an informal vignette that describes these data in some detail.