8 Overview of jamovi
jamovi is a free and open statistical software that helps us run our descriptive and inferential statistics. Why are we using jamovi and not another program?
- Did I mention it’s free? You can download it for free on your home computer or laptop and you won’t ever have to pay a dime to use the software in the future.
- It’s open source, meaning that the statistical community helps support and improve the program. As jamovi says, “jamovi is made by the scientific community, for the scientific community.” New packages with new options for analyses, graph creation, and so on, are being added all the time.
- It’s built on top of the R statistical language, meaning you can begin learning how to code (if you want). I do a lot of my statistical analyses using R in a different program called RStudio (actually Dana Wanzer’s book, which I am drawing heavily from for this book, was developed in RStudio and hosted on GitHub!). R is a very powerful tool which is also free and open source.
- It’s incredibly easy to learn and use. I have taught statistics using both SPSS and jamovi, and students greatly prefer jamovi.
- It promotes reproducibility. jamovi will save your data, analyses, options, and results all in one file so you can easily pick up where you left off. This will make your homework and future data analyses a breeze.
There are some videos that walk you through working with jamovi, available at datalab.cc/jamovi, if you like videos for walking you through how to do things. I have found in the past that students in this class prefer step-by-step instructions “on paper” because these are easier to refer back to in future, so I shall provide step-by-step instructions for jamovi throughout this book.
