Have you ever taken a survey at the doctor or for a job interview and wondered what exactly that data was used for? There is a long-standing series of methodologies, many coming from psychology, on how to reliably measure “latent” traits, such as depression or loyalty, from self-report survey data. 

While measurement is a common method in fields ranging from kinesiology to education, it’s usually conducted in proprietary tools like SPSS or MPlus. There is really not much training available online for survey development in R, but the program is beyond capable of conducting it through packages like psych  and lavaan. 

Over the summer, I presented the following hour-long workshop on survey development in R to the Greater Cleveland R Users meetup group. The video and slides are below. You can also access all code, files and assets used in the presentation on RStudio Cloud.

Slides:

To learn more about survey development, check out my DataCamp course, “Survey and Measure Development in R.” The first chapter is free. 

Is your meetup looking to learn about survey measurement? Would your organization like to build validated survey instruments? Does your organization do it, but wants to move to R? Drop me a line.