### Brief description

tidystats is a package to create a file containing the output of statistical models. The goal of this package is to help researchers accompany their manuscript with an organized data file of statistical results in order to greatly improve the reliability of meta-research and to reduce statistical reporting errors.

### Why?

Scientific hypotheses are tested using statistical tests. It is the output of the statistical tests that generally determine whether an hypothesis is supported or not. In other words, the output of statistical tests is important. Yet, statistical output is mostly treated like a second-class citizen.

• Insufficient statistics reporting
• Incorrect statistics reporting

I believe that tidystats can address both of these issues.

### How?

tidystats enables researchers to create a file that contains all statistics output. This file is a JSON file. JSON files are organized files of data that are easy to read for computers (but less easy to read for humans). The upside of storing statistics outside of a manuscript is that the researcher does not need to worry about which analyses to report in the space-limited manuscript. An additional benefit is that because JSON files are easy to read for computers, it is (relatively) easy to write software that does cool things with these files.

### Installation

tidystats can be installed from CRAN and the latest version can be installed from Github using devtools.

Please note that the package is still under heavy development, which means that the package is undergoing many changes that might break older code.

library(devtools)
install_github("willemsleegers/tidystats")

### Setup

To use tidystats, load the package and start by creating an empty list to store the results of statistical models in.

library(tidystats)

results <- list()

### Usage

The main function is add_stats(). The function has 2 necessary arguments:

• results: The list you want to add the statistical output to.
• output: The output of a statistical test you want to add to the list (e.g., the output of t.test() or lm())

Optional, but useful, arguments include adding a unique identifier and additional notes using the identifier and notes arguments.

The identifier is used to identify the model (e.g., ‘weight_height_correlation’). This has to be a unique value; the function will throw an error if a duplicate identifier is provided. If you do not provide an identifier, one is automatically created for you based on the name of the output variable.

The notes argument can (and should) be used to add additional information which you or others may find fruitful. For example, you can specify that the test is a manipulation check or one of the crucial hypothesis tests. Some statistical tests have default notes output (e.g., t-tests), which will be overwritten when a notes argument is supplied to the add_stats() function.

### An example

To illustrate how to use tidystats, I will analyze the Many Labs replication of Lorge & Curtiss (1936). Lorge and Curtiss (1936) examined how a quotation is perceived when it is attributed to a liked or disliked individual. The quotation of interest was:

“I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical world.”

In one condition the quotation was attributed to Thomas Jefferson and in the other it was attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Lorge and Curtiss (1936) found that people agree more with the quotation when the quotation was attributed to Jefferson than Lenin. In the Many Labs replication study, the quotation was attributed to either George Washington, the liked individual, or Osama Bin Laden, the disliked individual. We are again interested in testing whether the source of the quotation affects how it is evaluated (on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from 1 [disagreement] to 9 [agreement]).

Before getting into how tidystats should be used, let’s first simply analyze the data. I have designed tidystats to be minimally invasive. In other words, to use tidystats, you do not need to substantially change your data analysis workflow.

We start by visualizing the data and calculating several simple descriptives.

This looks like the effect is in the expected direction. Participates rated the quotation as more favorably when they believe the quote to be from George Washington.

Regarding descriptives, tidystats comes with its own function to calculate descriptives, inspired by the describe() function from the psych package.

quote_source %>%
group_by(source) %>%
describe_data(response)
variable missing N source M SD SE min max range median mode skew kurtosis
response 18 3083 Bin Laden 5.23 2.11 0.04 1 9 8 5 5 -0.08 2.59
response 0 3242 Washington 5.93 2.21 0.04 1 9 8 6 5 -0.23 2.18

Here we see exactly how many observations we have, per group. All the other information was already present in the violin plot.

To test whether the differences between the two sources are statistically significant, we perform a t-test. Normally, we would just run the t-test like so:

t.test(response ~ source, quote_source)

However, since we want to later add this analysis to our list of analyses, we need to store the output of the t-test in a variable. We can then see the output of the t-test by simply printing the variable to the console, like so:

main_test <- t.test(response ~ source, quote_source)
main_test
t p df difference 95% CI lower 95% CI upper
-12.80 4.6e-37 6322.72 -0.70 -0.80 -0.59

This shows us that there is a statistically significant effect of the quote source, consistent with the hypothesis.

Next, let’s run some additional analyses. One thing we can test is whether the effect is stronger in the US compared to non-US countries. To test this, we perform a regression analysis.

us_moderation_test <- lm(response ~ source * us_or_international, quote_source)
summary(us_moderation_test)
Term b SE t p
(Intercept) 5.249 0.085 61.83 0.00000
sourceWashington 0.405 0.117 3.46 0.00055
us_or_internationalUS -0.021 0.095 -0.22 0.82589
sourceWashington:us_or_internationalUS 0.372 0.132 2.81 0.00497

There appears to be a significant interaction. Since I’m terrible at interpretating interaction terms, let’s inspect the interaction with a graph.

We see that the effect of source is larger in the US. Given that the positive source was George Washington, this makes sense.

Next, let’s do one more analysis to see whether the effect is stronger in a lab setting compared to an online setting.

lab_moderation_test <- lm(response ~ source * lab_or_online, quote_source)
summary(lab_moderation_test)
Term b SE t p
(Intercept) 5.197 0.057 91.59 0.0e+00
sourceWashington 0.686 0.079 8.68 5.1e-18
lab_or_onlineonline 0.066 0.078 0.85 3.9e-01
sourceWashington:lab_or_onlineonline 0.017 0.109 0.16 8.7e-01

We see no significant interaction in this case. This means we do not find evidence that running the study in an online setting significantly weakens the effect; good to know!

Now let’s get to tidystats. We have three analyses we want to save: a t-test and two regression analyses. We stored each of these analyses in separate variables, called main_test, us_moderation_test, and lab_moderation_test. But we do not just want to save the output, we also want to add some additional information to each analysis. For the sake of this example, let’s say that the t-test was our primary test. We also had a suspicion that the location (US vs. international) would matter, but it wasn’t our main interest. Nevertheless, we preregistered these two analyses. During data analysis, we figured that it might also matter whether the study was conducted in the lab or online, so we tested it. This means that this is an exploratory analysis. With add_stats(), we can add this information.

We will add the three variables containing the analyses to the list we previously created, called results. This is done with the add_stats() function. add_stats() accepts a list as its first argument, followed by a variable containing a statistics model. In our case, this means we need to use the add_stats() function three times, as we have three different analyses we want to save. Since this can get pretty repetitive, we will use the piping operator to pipe link the three steps together and save some typing.

results <- results %>%
add_stats(main_test, type = "primary", preregistered = TRUE) %>%
add_stats(us_moderation_test, type = "secondary", preregistered = TRUE) %>%
add_stats(lab_moderation_test, type = "secondary", preregistered = FALSE)

I recommend to do this at the end of the data analysis script in a section called ‘tidystats’. This confines most of the tidystats code to a single section, keeping it organized, and it will keep most of your script readable to those unfamiliar with tidystats.

After all the analyses are added to the list, the list can be saved as a .json file to your computer’s disk. This is done with the write_stats() function. The function requires the list as its first argument, followed by a file path. I’m a big fan of using RStudio Project files so that you can define relative file paths. In this case, I create the .json file in the ‘Data’ folder of my project folder.

write_stats(results, "Data/results.json")

That’s it! You can now share the output of your statistical analyses with others or start using the file to report the results in your manuscript. Want to see what this .json file looks like? You can download it here. Open the file in a text editor to see how the statistics are structured. As you will see, it is not easy for our human eyes to quickly see the results, but that’s where computers come in.