# Social Science Statistics Blog

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« June 2009 | Main | September 2009 »

25 August 2009

### are you making causal inferences?

Do you have a research project where you're trying to make causal inferences from observational data? Do you think matching might be a useful technique? Are you wondering how to get reviewers to stop bothering you?! Would you like some free consulting advice and data analysis help?

We're involved in some methodological research in this area and could use some experience exploring different types of data sets. If you are interested, we would be like to help you with your data analyses and inferences (for a limited number of people and a limited time). Our interactions about your data will remain between us; in particular, we promise not to scoop you, criticize you in print, or use your data for any substantive purposes at all. In fact, for most purposes we don't even need to see your dependent variable. We would be interested in reporting in our research a few aggregated statistics that test methods we are developing, but we would only do that with your permission.

If you're interested, can you send us an email?

Many thanks,

Stefano Iacus (stefano.iacus@unimi.it)
Gary King (king@harvard.edu)

Posted by Gary King at 11:02 AM

20 August 2009

### The changing nature of R resources

There was a time that the only place to find R help was through the R-help listserv. But things have changed pretty drastically in just the last year or so as R has gained users from all different disciplines. I wanted to just point out a few resources that I have found useful over the last few months.

The #rstats hashtag on Twitter has a good following and a number of consistent contributors. If you already use Twitter, this is a great way to hear about interesting new applications of R or the growing number of R tutorials and meetups (Los Angeles and New York have already had a few well attended meetups).

Partially born from the #rstats group is the R tag on StackOverflow, a website dedicated to asking and answering programming questions. The R questions have only recently started to appear on StackOverflow, but if it takes off, it might be a smarter way to match up R users who need help and R experts who can help. The site has voting on answers so that unhelpful or repetitive answers will be weeded out. And since all of this is on one website, searching through the questions is quite a bit easier than trying to track down an R-help thread from 2004. Exciting stuff.

Posted by Matt Blackwell at 1:55 PM