Read crosstab data and weights

These two functions facilitate reading in Excel spreadsheets of crosstabs generated from SPSS. Note that they're likely only useful for working with the DataHaven Community Wellbeing Survey.

Usage

read_xtabs(
  path,
  name_prefix = "x",
  marker = "Nature of the [Ss]ample",
  year = NULL,
  process = FALSE,
  verbose = TRUE,
  ...
)

read_weights(path, year, marker = "Nature of the [Ss]ample")

Arguments

path

Path to an excel file

name_prefix

String used to create column names such as x1, x2, x3, ..., Default: 'x'

marker

String/regex pattern used to demarcate crosstabs from weight table. If NULL, it will be assumed that the file contains only crosstab data or weights, and no filtering will be done. If marker is never found, it's assumed that weights are in headers above the data, such as for 2021, in which case a different operation is done but the same weights table is returned. Default: "Nature of the [Ss]ample"

year

Numeric: year of the survey (or end year, in the case of pooled data). This tells the functions how to read the files, since formatting has changed across years of the survey. Because the ability to read a file depends so much on the year for which it was produced, this argument no longer defaults to a specific year. Instead, if NULL (the default), it will be guessed from the path. Supplying it explicitly is better, but this serves as a fallback.

process

Logical: if FALSE (the default), this will return the crosstab data to be processed, most likely by passing along to xtab2df. If TRUE, xtab2df will be called, and you'll receive a nice, clean data frame ready for analysis. This is only recommended if you already know for sure what the crosstab data looks like, so you don't accidentally lose some questions or important description. As a sanity check, you'll see a message listing the parameters used in the xtab2df call.

verbose

Logical: if process is true, should parameters being passed to xtab2df be printed? Defaults to TRUE to encourage you to double check that you're passing arguments intentionally.

...

Additional arguments passed on to xtab2df if process = TRUE.

Value

A data frame. For read_xtabs, there will be one column per demographic/geographic group included, plus one for the questions & answers. For read_weights, only 2 columns, one for demographic groups and one for their associated weights.

See also

xtab2df()

Examples

if (interactive()) {
    xt <- system.file("extdata/test_xtab2018.xlsx", package = "cwi")
    read_weights(xt, year = 2018)

    # returns a not-very-pretty data frame of the crosstabs to be processed
    read_xtabs(xt, year = 2018)
    # returns a pretty data frame ready for analysis
    read_xtabs(xt, year = 2018, process = TRUE)
}