I am a regular attendee at the Greater Cleveland R Users Meetup and participated in the September 2018 Lightning Talks, in which a series of speakers gave ~8min presentations on talk running the gamut of R.

My presentation came from the social science research world: statistical mediation.

In my graduate program we performed these statistics on proprietary software, some costing in the thousands for a license. R’s lavaan package includes most of their functionalities for free.

So I decided to explore the program and give a short talk about it.

It was hard to know what information to provide in a series of 8 minutes as many of these concepts took me months to internalize. In fact I ended up running at about six minutes so as to not become too technical and long-winded.

While I was a bit nervous speaking to nearly fifty quantitative professionals, I made it through just fine. It was good public speaking practice and I am now on the lookout to present in a longer format.

Below are the slides and video recording — the video starts at my segment but I encourage you to check out the other speeches as it is a nice sample of how R is used.