R for Political Science Research: Jane Sumner on Her New Book

Associate Professor Jane Sumner's new book, R for Political Science Research: An Introduction for Absolute Beginners, is a textbook meant to teach R, a programming language used for working with data, to students with no background in computers or programming. R is common in political science and other fields, so while it is aimed at political science students, anyone can use it as a class textbook or to work through themselves.

What inspired the book? What problem is it trying to solve?

I have a longstanding complaint with the books meant to teach quantitative methods and R to students: they tend to assume students either have a lot of background in math, statistics, or computing or that students don't have that background but are super excited to learn the material. In a normal semester with 60 students in POL 3085: Quantitative Analysis in Political Science, I have maybe one student like that, at most two or three. The majority of students who take POL 3085 are smart and hardworking, but they aren't taking the class because they're super enthusiastic about learning R or stats—they just want to fulfill their Mathematical Thinking liberal education requirement or they need a four-credit class. The majority of them have little to no experience with computers at all. Talking with friends and colleagues at other universities, this is usually true for them as well. We just don't see this mythical student who knows all about how computers work and has this huge internal source of motivation to learn about programming and stats. It seemed we needed a textbook that was written for that student, that could help them learn the material, even if mostly what they felt was not enthusiasm for it, but instead a sort of dread or resignation.

I'm really grateful to all the students who've taken POL 3085 between 2016 to the present because it was my notes from teaching that class—which grew more and more detailed with every student who asked a question, who was confused, who emailed me, who came to office hours—that developed into this book.

Why were you interested in exploring this?

I think like most things I do, the root is just being annoyed. I've been so irritated that a lot of the stuff meant to teach students R just aren't really accessible—even some of the most beginner-level materials use a vocabulary that assumes you know a lot about how to use your computer or about how programming languages work. And this makes sense because the people who develop these materials are people who, for the most part, assume all that stuff is really basic, when it's actually not for most students. That means a lot of students who might actually find out they really like R, or like programming, or at least find that it can be really useful for them, lose out on the opportunity to discover that.

What were your biggest takeaways from the project?

A big thing I learned is that the millennials are kind of unique: we learned a lot about basic computer skills in middle and high school because computers were still pretty new but not rare, and everyone assumed we'd need to know how to use them, so they taught us. People older than us didn't learn those skills because computers were not that common, and people younger than us mostly didn't learn those skills because everyone assumed that since they were "digital natives" they inherently knew them. I ended up writing about a lot of non-R computer things in the book—things like folders, file extensions—because you need to know them to use R, and I had to revise that a lot because the things I assumed were common knowledge really aren't anymore.

What's next for you?

I'm mostly working on a book now about small business owners and political involvement, focusing specifically on Minnesota. It's a very different project. I don't think I'll be writing another textbook anytime soon, but who knows.