Chapter 1 Preface

This is an R adaptation of the statistics content from a subject called Research Process for Music Psychologists (MUSI90252). The subject is an introduction to research methods for new Masters and PhD students in music psychology and music science at the University of Melbourne.

The general idea

The subject’s statistics material was originally written for Jamovi, given its ease of use and impressive functionality. However, we have also encouraged any quantitative-oriented students to consider learning R in the long term. With that in mind, by and large the content is a very faithful reproduction of the Jamovi-focused content in the Canvas shell, except:

  • Some commentary has either been added for R-specific material (e.g. information on functions).
  • Some embedded content is not available here (mainly Jamovi-specific content, and Readings Online content).
  • Some content has been reorganised because of how R outputs things compared to Jamovi.
  • The first chapter is a very (very) brief overview of how to use core R and tidyverse functions.

The R version of the RPMP content is therefore a little different to the regular Jamovi version, by virtue of the fact that even though Jamovi is built on R it isn’t necessarily built with R users in mind. Rather, Jamovi is built for users of SPSS and other platforms who may be used to a point-and-click approach. To clarify, there’s nothing wrong with this at all - I actually think this is a great thing, and I believe one of Jamovi’s greatest strengths is how easy it is to use.

At the same time, for the budding R-using music psychologist - at least for RPMP - it means that the same procedures in R work a little differently to how they function in Jamovi. For this reason that the R adaptation of the RPMP content has been written with the key principle of parity with Jamovi in mind. That is, the focus of writing this version of the RPMP material has been to align the procedures, outputs etc. with what Jamovi provides. R can and will do so much more than what is presented in this book, and we encourage interested students to seek out this content separately.