11. Make It Pretty: Scree Plots and Parallel Analysis Using psych and ggplot2

I’m back with a new Make It Pretty post. I’ve been quietly thrilled with how well my other two Make It Pretty posts have done. My post on visualizing various 2-way interactions (easily my most popular not-current-issue post) has been viewed over 1000 times, and more excitingly, is now the top hit if you google “2-way interaction ggplot2”. And though much less popular, I’m still happy with the ~300 views my meta-analysis visualizations post (on forest and funnel plots) has attracted–I even saw one of my funnel plots in the ‘wild’ shortly after! With this post, I’m going to be showing how you can use the psych package in conjunction with ggplot2 in order to create a prettier scree plot with parallel analysis–a very useful visualization when conducting exploratory factor analysis.

10. On the OSF/OkCupid Data Dump: A Batman Analogy

Today, my worlds collide: I’m blogging about sexual/relationship science, scientific methodology, and Batman–three things I love talking about. I never thought that a cause to discuss the three, simultaneously, would manifest in a single issue. But here we are:

.@okcupid put a bunch of their data on @OSFramework (!!!). If you need me I'll be frolicking in this for awhile https://t.co/TDTH9LrtPX

— Nina Strohminger (@NinaStrohminger) May 11, 2016

The post above was retweeted by a Twitter buddy, and my first reaction was likely the same had by many sexual/relationship scientists. “You mean I can finally use peoples’ answers to all those insanely interesting sexuality questions on OKC in my research!?” The result:

But then, when I went to the OSF repository where the data is located to read the authors’ description/justification of how the data were collected (tl;dr the authors wrote a program to “scrape” user content, after accessing OkCupid), and my elation quickly began to fade.