The psychTools package includes functions and data sets to accompany the psych package which does classic and modern psychometrics and to analyze personality and experimental psychological data sets. The psych package has been developed as a supplement to courses in research methods in psychology, personality research, and graduate level psychometric theory. The functions are a supplement to the text (seemingly forever in progress): https://personality-project.org/r/book/An introduction to psychometric theory with applications in R.
A number of vignettes describing how to use psych are included in psychTools.
Miscellaneous helper functions for reading, writing and merging data files and are included as well.
Version 2.6.4 is the current version of the psychTools package. It is available as a source file for Macs or PCs in the repository at https://personality-project.org/r/. The released version on CRAN is 2.5.7. The second digit reflects the year (i.e., 2024), the third set the month (i.e., 2.3.12 was released in December of 2023, the last two digits of development versions reflect either an minor change or the day of any modifications, e.g. 1.8.3.3 was the third attempt to get 1.8.3 released. 1.7.8 was released in August, 2017.
To install the development version, use the command: install.packages("psychTools", repos="https://personality-project.org/r/", type="source"). Remember to restart R and library(psych) and library(psychTools) to make the new version active.
To see the date of the new version, use packageDate("psychTools"). (I sometimes update the packages on my server without changing the version number.)
These data sets are meant to be useful adjuncts to teaching and research.
Additional functions are added sporadically.
This NEWS file reports changes that have been made as the package has been developed.
To report bugs, send email to mailto:[email protected] using bug.report. Remember to include the systemInfo() information and a Minimal Working Example.
To make the help vignettes more up to date, I am releasing version 2.6.4.
Added a discussion of CFA to the how to factor vignette
Also added a discussion of the change in factor indeterminancy function used in fa and omega as well as the addition of a new function to do all of this (fsi)
Dropped the functions that use rtf as that is no longer available on CRAN.
Finally figured out how to properly format URLs in the vignettes!
Minor correction to factor.rnw and introduction.rnw to match change in psych sim.item function (6/19/25)
Needed to change the version number to 2.5.7.22 because of mismatch between psych and psychTools. sim.item had been changed in psych_2.5.6 but since CRAN still had 2.5.3, I added a check to factor and overview vignettes. Thus the confusing version number.
Added the vignette for factor analysis, improved the Omega vignette
Added capabilities to vJoin to merge by a grouping variable.
Added the hare function to do Hare or Ranked Choice Voting
Added rd2html to allow for conversion of Rd files to HTML. This allows for single files (specify the file) or complete directories (e.g. the help files) by choosing a directory.
Various improvements to vignettes to make them clearer and updated the links
added 3 functions to convert to rtf format for those who like WORD. df2rtf, cor2rtf, fa2rtf.
Modified fa2latex to properly handle long tables and some other features requested by Alex Weiss.
Various patches to fa2latex to fix problems reported by Alexander Weiss.
Added the salary dataset from Cohen, Cohen, Aiken and West (2003), chapter 3.
Added the key.name parameter to vJoin
Added function rearrange to allow new ordering of dataframe columns
Added function wide2long to convert wide output to long output
Added vJoin and combineMatrices to allow for some basic file manipulation.
Added recode to allow recoding of variables (requested by Yaelle Pierre).
Added selectBy and splitBy to implement trivial but helpful actions.
Improved help for globalWarm and updated various vignettes.
Added the colom data set
Modified fa2latex to handle output from faLookup.
Added more scoring keys to the Athenstaedt data to allow for demonstrations of alpha and omega
Add cross references from Athenstaedt and GERAS (Gruber) data sets.
Added a correlation matrix from Ann Zola et al. (2021) showing the validity of self reports compared to peer ratings.
Added the Athenstaedt data set as well as a dictionary and scoring keys.
Improved the GERAS dictionary to make the graphics match manuscript by Eagly and Revelle (2022)
Improved dfOrder to treat matrices as well. This quasi mimics fa.lookup in that it sorts numeric values by largest in the row rather than lexicographically.
Added the long option to fa2latex (requested by Alexander Weiss)
Added the eminence data set from Simonton and del Giudice as a nice example of misinterpretation of beta weights in the presence of highly colinear predictors.
Updated this news file for version 2.1.6 to reflect datasets added.
Added the GERAS dataset from Gruber et al. (2020) to show Mahalobnis distances in scatterHist.
Added the Spengeler and Damian data sets from Project Talent (nice example of mediation)
Added the USAF data set of anthropometric measurements (to help understand what a g factor does or does not mean)
Added the globalWarm data set from Erik Nisbett (to help in mediation)
Added the ability to do long tables in df2latex (requested by Lizz Dworak)
Moved four vignettes over from psych to make psych smaller.
Current vignettes here include overview, omega, factor, and mediation
Checked against psych_2.0.12 and psych_2.1.3
Added B5 and L27 columns to the spi.dictionary.
Nothing yet
Added the BFI 100 items as a data set
.dat and RData files were not being read in read.file following a clean up in code.
ability.keys to the ability.rda file
Modified df2latex to allow mixed numeric and character with rounding of numeric
None yet
Modified df2latex to allow mixed numeric and character with rounding of numeric
Fixed dfOrder to handle Null data
Fixed holzinger.swineford and holzinger.raw for two cases (180 and 231) where K. Widaman had provided incorrect values (thanks to Keith for finding this).
Added the holzinger.raw, holzinger.swineford and holzinger.dictionary data sets. The data come from Keith Widaman.
None yet.
Added bfi.keys to the bfi data set
Added examples to the sai data set to match Revelle and Condon 2019
Added spengler data set
Minor correction to the cities help file
Data sets and a few helper functions switched over from psych to psychTools to make psych a smaller package.
Data sets included are: ability, bfi, epi.bfi,income, iqitems, msq, msqR, neo, sai, spi, and tai.
Helper functions include the df2latex set, dfOrder, and the various file utilities such as read.clipboard.
Version number increased to 1.9.5.18 as we work through minor fixes to the submission to meet the newly enforced more stringent requirements of CRAN
Changed cat and print in interactive functions (fileCreate) to message() following request from CRAN
Following yet another request from CRAN, changed the read.file function to not automatically load an .rda file, but rather suggest how to load it.
Changed the use of %in% to is.element to get around some problems in the msqR help file
Changed the examples in read.clipboard to donttest instead of dontrun because they are interactive
Changed all dontrun to donttest following request from CRAN.
None yet