R Dataset / Package mosaicData / Galton
On this R-data statistics page, you will find information about the Galton data set which pertains to Galton's dataset of parent and child heights. The Galton data set is found in the mosaicData R package. You can load the Galton data set in R by issuing the following command at the console data("Galton"). This will load the data into a variable called Galton. If R says the Galton data set is not found, you can try installing the package by issuing this command install.packages("mosaicData") and then attempt to reload the data with the library() command. If you need to download R, you can go to the R project website. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) version of the Galton R data set. The size of this file is about 20,032 bytes.
Galton's dataset of parent and child heights
Description
In the 1880's, Francis Galton was developing ways to quantify the heritability of traits. As part of this work, he collected data on the heights of adult children and their parents.
Usage
data(Galton)
Format
A data frame with 898 observations on the following variables.
-
family
a factor with levels for each family -
father
the father's height (in inches) -
mother
the mother's height (in inches) -
sex
the child's sex:F
orM
-
height
the child's height as an adult (in inches) -
nkids
the number of adult children in the family, or, at least, the number whose heights Galton recorded.
Details
Entries were deleted for those children whose heights were not recorded numerically by Galton, who sometimes used entries such as “tall”, “short”, “idiotic”, “deformed” and so on.
Source
The data were transcribed by J.A. Hanley who has published them at http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/galton/
References
"Transmuting" women into men: Galton's family data on human stature. (2004) The American Statistician, 58(3):237-243.
Examples
data(Galton)
Dataset imported from https://www.r-project.org.