gescrss_codebook {rfars}

GESCRSS Codebook

Description

A table describing each GESCRSS variable name, value, and corresponding value label.

Usage

gescrss_codebook

Format

A data frame with 85,907 rows and 8 variables:

source

The source of the data (either FARS or GESCRSS)

years

Years of the data element definition.

file

The data file that contains the given variable.

name_ncsa

The original name of the data element.

name_rfars

The modified data element name used in rfars

label

The label of the data element itself (not its constituent values).

value

The original value of the data element.

value_label

The de-coded value label.

Details

This codebook serves as a useful reference for researchers using GES/CRSS data. The 'source' variable is intended to help combine with the fars_codebook. Data elements are relatively stable but are occasionally discontinued, created anew, or modified. The 'year' variable helps indicate the availability of data elements, and differentiates between different definitions over time. Users should always check for discontinuities when tabulating cases.

The 'file' variable indicates the file in which the given data element originally appeared. Here, files refers to the SAS files downloaded from NHTSA. Most data elements stayed in their original file. Those that did not were moved to the multi_ files. For example, 'weather' originates from the 'accident' file, but appears in the multi_acc data object created by rfars.

The 'name_ncsa' variable describes the data element's name as assigned by NCSA (the organization within NHTSA that manages the database). To maximize compatibility between years and ease of use for programming, 'name_rfars' provides a cleaned naming convention (via janitor::clean_names()). Both names are provided here to help users find the corresponding entry in the CRSS User Manual but only the latter are used in the data produced by get_gescrss().

Each data element has a 'label', a more human-readable version of the element names. For example, the label for 'harm_ev' is 'First Harmful Event'. These are not definitions but may provide enough information to help users conduct their analysis. Consult the CRSS User Manual for definitions and further details.

Each data element has multiple 'value'-'value_label' pairs: 'value' represents the original, non-human-readable value (usually a number), and 'value_label' represents the corresponding text value. For example, for 'harm_ev', 1 (the 'value') corresponds to 'Rollover/Overturn' (the 'value_label'), 2 corresponds to 'Fire/Explosion', etc.

See Also

"fars_codebook"