rdss: Helper functions for Research Design in the Social Sciences book

Helper functions for using the book Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, Redesign by Blair, Coppock, and Humphreys 2023 (Princeton University Press).

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("rdss")

or the development version from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("DeclareDesign/rdss")

estimator_AS_tidy(), used in the book’s section on experiments over networks, also needs the ‘interference’ package, which is not on CRAN:

remotes::install_github("szonszein/interference")

did_multiplegt_tidy(), used in the book’s section on difference-in-differences, needs the ‘polars’ package, which is also not on CRAN:

install.packages("polars", repos = "https://rpolars.r-universe.dev")

Example

Each helper fills one step of a declaration in the book, and its help page links to the section that uses it. lag_by_group(), for instance, builds the lagged treatment indicator in the difference-in-differences design:

library(rdss)
library(dplyr)

panel <-
  tibble(
    unit = rep(c("a", "b"), each = 3),
    period = rep(1:3, times = 2),
    D = c(0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1)
  ) |>
  mutate(D_lag = lag_by_group(D, groups = unit, n = 1, order_by = period))

panel

## # A tibble: 6 × 4
##   unit  period     D D_lag
##   <chr>  <int> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 a          1     0    NA
## 2 a          2     1     0
## 3 a          3     1     1
## 4 b          1     0    NA
## 5 b          2     0     0
## 6 b          3     1     0