Although I am a qualitative researcher at heart, I’m also a keen user of the statistical software R for my quantitative research projects. To my mind, R offers a number of advantages. It is free, it produces beautiful and informative plots, it encourages analytical thinking and familiarization with statistical concepts. It is also becoming extremely popular and it has a vibrant community of software developers and users that can provide assistance and develop new tools to deal with tasks as they emerge.
I attended the Oxford Spring School in Modern Regression in 2010 that was taught by Dr. Robert Andersen and Dr. David Armstrong. Since then, all of my R learning has been self-taught. To date I have used R to conduct sentiment analysis, event history analysis, as well as standard OLS and logistic regression. I have taught three successive introductory courses in R at the Laurier School In Research Methods.
One marginally useful innovation I have developed for R is a plugin to the tm (“text mining”) package that reads in files containing news articles from Canadian media outlets in the Canadian Newsstream database. It extracts all of the useful metadata contained in each article (e.g. author, title, date of publication and word length, as well as section and page number) and prepares the article text for computer assisted content analysis. I have intentions of preparing the package for submission to CRAN, but for the moment, you can get a working version from my github.
References
Kiss, Simon. 2013. “Legislation by Agenda-Setting: Assessing the Media’s Role in the Regulation of Bisphenol A in the U.S. States.” Mass Communication and Society 16 (5): 687–712. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2013.768345.
Kiss, Simon. 2014a. “Responding to the ’New Public’: The Arrival of Strategic Communications and Managed Participation in Alberta.” Canadian Public Administration 57 (1): 26–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/capa.12053.
Kiss, Simon. 2014b. “Where Did All The Baby Bottles Go? Risk Perception, Interest Groups, Media Coverage and Institutional Imperatives in Canada’s Regulation of Bisphenol A.” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 47 (4): 741–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43298446.
Kiss, Simon, Peter Graefe, and Matt Polacko. 2023. “The Education And Income Voting Divides In Canada And Their Consequences For Redistributive Politics.” Electoral Studies 85 (October). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102648.
Kiss, Simon, and Erick Lachapelle. 2019. “Opposition to Carbon Pricing and Right-Wing Populism: Ontario’s 2018 General Election.” Environmental Politics, ahead of print, April 29. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1608659.
Kiss, Simon, Erick Lachapelle, and Eric Montpetit. 2020. “Beyond Region and Ideology: Cultural Theory and Risk Perception in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 53 (2). https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0008423920000177.
Kiss, Simon, Andrea Perrella, and Barry Kay. 2014. “How to Win and Lose an Election: Campaign Dynamics of the 2011 Ontario Election.” Canadian Political Science Review 8 (1). https://doi.org/10.24124/c677/2014497.
Kiss, Simon, Karly Rath, and Andrea Perrella. 2018. “Balanced Journalism Amplifies Minority Voices: A Case Study of a Fluoridation Plebiscite.” Canadian Journal of Communication 43 (4). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2018v43n4a3355.
Lachapelle, Erick, Simon Kiss, and Éric Montpetit. 2018. “Public Perceptions of Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking) in Canada: Corporate Ownership, Issue Familiarity, and Cultural Bias.” Extractive Industries and Society 5 (4). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.07.003.
Perrella, Andrea ML, and Simon Kiss. 2015. “Risk Perception, Psychological Heuristics and the Water Fluoridation Controversy.” Canadian Journal of Public Health 106 (4): e197–203. https://doi.org/10.17269/cjph.106.4828.
Perrella, Andrea ML, Simon Kiss, and Barry J. Kay. 2017. “Triple Play: The Ontario 2014 General Election.” Canadian Political Science Review 11 (1): 157–81. http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/article/view/1461.
Perrella, Andrea, Simon Kiss, and Barry J. Kay. 2020. “Conservative Populism, or Unpopular Liberalism? Review of the 2018 Ontario Provincial Election.” Canadian Political Science Review 14 (1): 118–46. http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/cpsr/article/view/1790.
Polacko, Matthew, Peter Graefe, and Simon Kiss. 2024. “Subjective Economic Insecurity and Attitudes Toward Immigration and Feminists Among Voters on the Right in Canada.” Social Science Quarterly 105 (2): 281–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.13336.
Polacko, Matthew, Peter Graefe, and Simon Kiss. 2025. “Revisiting the Sectoral Cleavage in Canada: Evidence From the Canadian Election Studies.” Canadian Review of Sociology = Revue Canadienne De Sociologie, ahead of print, August 18. https://doi.org/10.1111/cars.70014.
Polacko, Matthew, Peter Graefe, and Simon Kiss. 2026. “The Changing Class Basis of Canadian and Social Democratic Futures.” Perspectives, no. 5 (January). https://perspectivesjournal.ca/changing-class-socdem-future/.
Polacko, Matthew, Simon Kiss, and Peter Graefe. 2022. “The Changing Nature of Class Voting in Canada, 1965–2019.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 55 (3): 663–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423922000439.
Wootten, George W., and Simon J. Kiss. 2019. “The Ambiguous Definition of Open Government: Parliamentarians, Journalists and Bloggers Define Open Government In Accordance With Their Interests.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 52 (3): 479–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423918000446.