This one-hour workshop introduces students to the structure of NHANES (a CDC/NCHS program that combines interviews, physical examinations, laboratory measures, and dietary information) data and demonstrates a beginner-friendly R workflow for importing local files, joining participant-level tables, creating first visualizations, and saving outputs.
We will explore how NHANES files are organized by cycle and file family, why codebooks and documentation should be stored with the data, and how to use relative paths to import local XPT files from a prepared project folder.
Using NHANES datasets, participants will inspect variables, perform basic data cleaning, join tables, and create and save simples figures using the tidyverse ecosystem, with a focus on the dplyr and ggplot2 packages.
Although the examples use NHANES data, the workflow and R skills introduced in this workshop are broadly applicable to many public health and nutrition datasets.
Presenter: Nancy Chi, Nutrition School