A Beginner’s Guide to Statistics for Criminology and Criminal Justice Using R

This book provides hands-on guidance for researchers and practitioners in criminal justice and criminology to perform statistical analyses and data visualization in the free and open-source software, R. It offers a step-by-step guide for beginners to become familiar with the RStudio platform. This volume will help users master the fundamentals of the R programming language, in addition to program basics. Tutorials in each chapter lay out research questions and hypotheses that center around a real criminal justice dataset, such as data from the National Youth Survey, Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS)-Body Worn Camera Survey, the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SISFCF), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the British Crime Survey/Crime Survey for England and Wales, and the Seattle Neighborhoods and Crime Survey. At the end of each chapter are exercises that reinforce the R tutorial examples, designed to help master the software, as well as to provide practice on statistical concepts, data analysis, and interpretation of results. The text can be used as a stand-alone guide to learning R or it can be used as a companion guide to an introductory statistics textbook, such as Basic Statistics in Criminal Justice (2020).