Apply Meta Data Changes. — applyChangeMeta • eatGADS

Function to apply meta data changes to a GADSdat object specified by a change table extracted by getChangeMeta.

Usage

applyChangeMeta(changeTable, GADSdat, ...)

# S3 method for class 'varChanges'
applyChangeMeta(changeTable, GADSdat, checkVarNames = TRUE, ...)

# S3 method for class 'valChanges'
applyChangeMeta(
  changeTable,
  GADSdat,
  existingMeta = c("stop", "value", "value_new", "drop", "ignore"),
  ...
)

Arguments

changeTable: Change table as provided by getChangeMeta.
GADSdat: GADSdat object imported via eatGADS.
...: further arguments passed to or from other methods.
checkVarNames: Logical. Should new variable names be checked by checkVarNames?
existingMeta: If values are recoded, which meta data should be used (see details)?

Value

Returns the modified GADSdat object.

Details

Values for which the change columns contain NA remain unchanged. If changes are performed on value levels, recoding into existing values can occur. In these cases, existingMeta determines how the resulting meta data conflicts are handled, either raising an error if any occur ("stop"), keeping the original meta data for the value ("value"), using the meta data in the changeTable and, if incomplete, from the recoded value ("value_new"), or leaving the respective meta data untouched ("ignore").

Furthermore, one might recode multiple old values in the same new value. This is currently only possible with existingMeta = "drop", which drops all related meta data on value level, or existingMeta = "ignore", which leaves all related meta data on value level untouched.

Examples

# Change a variable name and label
varChangeTable <- getChangeMeta(pisa, level = "variable")
varChangeTable[1, c("varName_new", "varLabel_new")] <- c("IDstud", "Person ID")

pisa2 <- applyChangeMeta(varChangeTable, GADSdat = pisa)