This document is a lab assignment, Lab Six, for Emory University’s Introduction to Statistical Inference (QTM 100) course. It’s designed for students to practice data cleaning and manipulation techniques using a provided dataset of alleged abduction cases. The lab is completed in groups, as indicated by the group member listing.
This assignment matters for students learning to work with real-world data, which is rarely perfectly formatted. It’s used to reinforce skills in data wrangling – preparing data for analysis – a crucial step in any statistical investigation. It exists as a practical application of concepts discussed in the course.
This lab assignment focuses on *applying* data manipulation, it does not *teach* the underlying statistical inference concepts. Students will still need to understand the ‘why’ behind these techniques, which is covered in lectures and readings.
This document provides R code snippets and associated output for: recoding variables (sex, abduction times), creating new variables (age, education level, marital status), and checking the results of these manipulations. It includes the original code, the resulting output from running the code, and brief explanations of the changes made. It does *not* include a complete explanation of R syntax or statistical inference principles. This preview does not include the final section of the assignment concerning marital status.
