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Transform one or multiple character variables to factor.

Source: R/multiChar2fac.R
multiChar2fac.Rd

Convert one or multiple character variables to factors. If multiple variables are converted, a common set of value labels is created, which is identical across variables. Existing value labels are preserved.

Usage

multiChar2fac(
  GADSdat,
  vars,
  var_suffix = "_r",
  label_suffix = "(recoded)",
  convertCases = NULL
)

Arguments

GADSdat

A data.frame or GADSdat object.

vars

A character vector with all variables that should be transformed to factor.

var_suffix

Variable suffix for the newly created GADSdat. If an empty character, the existing variables are overwritten.

label_suffix

Suffix added to variable label for the newly created variable in the GADSdat.

convertCases

Should cases be transformed for all variables? Default NULL leaves cases as they are. Available options for converting cases are all lower case ('lower'), all upper case ('upper'), or first letter upper case, everything else lower case ('upperFirst').

Value

Returns a GADSdat containing the newly computed variable.

Details

If a set of variables has the same possible values, it is desirable that these variables share the same value labels, even if some of the values do not occur on the individual variables. This function allows the transformation of multiple character variables to factors while assimilating the value labels. The SPSS format of the newly created variables is set to F10.0.

A current limitation of the function is that prior to the conversion, all variables specified in vars must have identical meta data on value level (value labels and missing tags).

If necessary, missing codes can be set after transformation via checkMissings for setting missing codes depending on value labels for all variables or changeMissings for setting missing codes for specific values in a specific variable.

The argument convertCases uses the function convertCase internally. See the respective documentation for more details.

Examples

## create an example GADSdat
example_df <- data.frame(ID = 1:4,
                        citizenship1 = c("German", "English", "missing by design", "Chinese"),
                        citizenship2 = c("missing", "German", "missing by design", "Polish"),
                        stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
gads <- import_DF(example_df)

## transform one character variable
gads2 <- multiChar2fac(gads, vars = "citizenship1")

## transform multiple character variables
gads2 <- multiChar2fac(gads, vars = c("citizenship1", "citizenship2"))

## set values to missings
gads3 <- checkMissings(gads2, missingLabel = "missing")
#> The following variables have value labels including the term 'missing' which are not coded as missing:
#> citizenship1_r, citizenship2_r
#> 'miss' is inserted into column missings for 4 rows.