surveydata-package {surveydata}

Tools, classes and methods to manipulate survey data.

Description

Tools, classes and methods to manipulate survey data.

Details

Surveydata objects have been designed to function with SPSS export data, i.e. the result of an SPSS import, foreign::read.spss(). This type of data is contained in a data.frame, with information about the questionnaire text in the variable.labels attribute. Surveydata objects keep track of the variable labels, by offering methods for renaming, subsetting, etc.

Coercion functions:

• as.surveydata()

• is.surveydata()

• as.data.frame.surveydata()

To access and modify attributes:

• pattern()

• varlabels()

To subset or merge surveydata objects:

• merge()

• Extract()

• cbind.surveydata()

To extract question text from varlabels:

• question_text()

• question_text_common()

• question_text_unique()

To fix common encoding problems:

• encToInt()

• intToEnc()

• fix_common_encoding_problems()

To clean data:

• remove_dont_know() to remove "Don't know" responses

• remove_all_dont_know() to remove "Don't know" responses from all questions

• fix_levels_01() to fix level formatting of all question with Yes/No type answers

Miscellaneous tools:

• dropout() to determine questions where respondents drop out

Author(s)

Andrie de Vries [e-mail]

Examples

library(surveydata)

# Create surveydata object

sdat <- data.frame(
    id   = 1:4,
    Q1   = c("Yes", "No", "Yes", "Yes"),
    Q4_1 = c(1, 2, 1, 2), 
    Q4_2 = c(3, 4, 4, 3), 
    Q4_3 = c(5, 5, 6, 6), 
    Q10 = factor(c("Male", "Female", "Female", "Male")),
    crossbreak  = c("A", "A", "B", "B"), 
    weight      = c(0.9, 1.1, 0.8, 1.2)
)

varlabels(sdat) <- c(
    "RespID",
    "Question 1", 
    "Question 4: red", "Question 4: green", "Question 4: blue", 
    "Question 10",
    "crossbreak",
    "weight"
  )

sv <- as.surveydata(sdat, renameVarlabels = TRUE)

# Extract specific questions
sv[, "Q1"]
sv[, "Q4"]

# Query attributes
varlabels(sv)
pattern(sv)

# Find unique questions

questions(sv)
which.q(sv, "Q1")
which.q(sv, "Q4")

# Find question text
question_text(sv, "Q1")
question_text(sv, "Q4")

question_text_common(sv, "Q4")
question_text_unique(sv, "Q4")


# Basic operations on a surveydata object, illustrated with the example dataset membersurvey

class(membersurvey)

questions(membersurvey)

which.q(membersurvey, "Q1")
which.q(membersurvey, "Q3")
which.q(membersurvey, c("Q1", "Q3"))

question_text(membersurvey, "Q3")
question_text_unique(membersurvey, "Q3")
question_text_common(membersurvey, "Q3")

# Extracting columns from a surveydata object

head(membersurvey[, "Q1"])
head(membersurvey["Q1"])
head(membersurvey[, "Q3"])
head(membersurvey[, c("Q1", "Q3")])

# Note that the result is always a surveydata object, even if only one column is extracted

head(membersurvey[, "id"])
str(membersurvey[, "id"])