Using mutate() from dplyr to Create New Variables

Instructor: Robert Huang
Speaking Script: Ben Graham, Bethany Thompson, Gaea Morales, Robert Huang
R Script: Alix Ziff, Ben Graham, Gaea Morales, Jihyun Shin, Robert Huang, Therese Anders

This video covers the mutate() function in the dplyr package. This function allows you to create new variables using the existing variables and add them to the dataset.

This video is part of the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab curriculum in applied data science. The curriculum includes written walkthroughs, groupwork exercises, and homework (individual) exercises, all of which come with detailed answer keys. So don’t just watch the videos! Mastering this material requires working through the entire self-study curriculum, which is all free on our website.

We cover data management and data visualization, with a focus on political science and international relations applications. This curriculum prepares students for PhD programs in the social sciences as well as jobs as research assistants and data scientists in academia, government, NGOs, and industry. You will learn to write elegant, well-annotated code to extract meaning from data and communicate that meaning to non-technical audiences. We teach data management using the tidyverse package (tidyr and dplyr) and data visualization using ggplot2.

Additional Keywords: generate; append; insert; replace; dummy; conditional statement