Curving Normality generally consists of two parts: my personal blog and a manual for R-Project I wrote last year. I want to continue working on this manual, and to increase the exposure it gets I decided to regularly post chapters of it on my blog. I will do so under the name R-Sessions

This manual is already set up in a way that allows the reader to try all the examples by copy-pasting the syntax. I want to extend this feature and add chapters on a specific statistical problem that is dealt with, from a description of the problem and initial exploration of the data to the final solution to the problem. However, I’m not at that point yet. In the near future expect several updates each week in which I present the existing manual.

The reason that I’m writing such a manual for R-Project is that to my opinion, R-Project is a magnificent statistical program, even though it has some severe limitations. It is ready to be accepted and implemented in the social sciences. The flexibility of this program and the way data are handled gives the user a feeling of closeness to the data. I think this inspires users to analyze their data more creatively and sometimes in a more advanced way. At present, this manual has a strong focus on multilevel regression techniques. Reason for this is that in R-Project it is very easy to estimate these types of models, even the more complex variants. The more basic and fundamental aspects of R-Project are introduced as well. All this is done with the needs of the quantitative social scientist in mind.