dataobservatory-eu/eurobarometer

retrospective harmonization of Eurobarometer

eurobarometer

The goal of eurobarometer is to provide helper functions for the use of the retroharmonize package when working with SPSS versions of the Eurobarometer surveys files that are stored at GESIS. This package was not made, and is not affiliated with GESIS.

Currently eurobarometer can be seen as a development version of the retroharmonize pacakge. Some important functions of retroharmonized are being modernized with new dependencies: a new questionbank, DDIwR, dataset and declared. After thorough testing, most of these functions will be moved back to retroharmonize. Eurobarometer will remain a helper package to use retroharmonize with Eurobarometer surveys. It will serve as a template for similar works with other survey programs, for example, Afrobarometer.

Overview

• Articles on the package website.
• Function reference.

Installation

Because eurobarometer is in an early development phase, you cannot install it from CRAN with the install.packages("eurobarometer") command yet. You can install the development version of eurobarometer from GitHub with devtools. If you have not used devtools yet, please refer to the Installation Guide vignette:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("dataobservatory-eu/eurobarometer")

Import Surveys

The read_sav_gesis() function is a wrapper with DDIwR::convert() with the following modifications:

library(eurobarometer)
ZA5933 <- read_sav_gesis(file = system.file("extdata", "ZA5933_sample.sav", 
                                            package = "eurobarometer"))

Work with Codebooks

codebook_create(ZA5933[, c("d25", "d60")], 
                val_labels = TRUE, 
                freq = TRUE)
#> Codebook for Eurobarometer 82.4 (November-December 2014) (subset) [10.4232/1.13044] 
#>            survey var_name_orig                        var_label_orig
#> 1 10.4232/1.13044           d25                     TYPE OF COMMUNITY
#> 2 10.4232/1.13044           d25                     TYPE OF COMMUNITY
#> 3 10.4232/1.13044           d25                     TYPE OF COMMUNITY
#> 4 10.4232/1.13044           d25                     TYPE OF COMMUNITY
#> 5 10.4232/1.13044           d60 DIFFICULTIES PAYING BILLS - LAST YEAR
#> 6 10.4232/1.13044           d60 DIFFICULTIES PAYING BILLS - LAST YEAR
#> 7 10.4232/1.13044           d60 DIFFICULTIES PAYING BILLS - LAST YEAR
#> 8 10.4232/1.13044           d60 DIFFICULTIES PAYING BILLS - LAST YEAR
#>   val_code_orig             val_label_orig
#> 1             1      Rural area or village
#> 2             2 Small or middle sized town
#> 3             3                 Large town
#> 4             8                         DK
#> 5             1           Most of the time
#> 6             2          From time to time
#> 7             3         Almost never/never
#> 8             7           Refusal (SPONT.)

For further details, see Codebooks with retroharmonize and Eurobarometer Question Bank & Basic Code Table vignettes.

Harmonization with Crosswalk Tables

For further details, see Harmonize Surveys with Crosswalk Tables vignette.

Archivation

For further details, see DDI Codebooks with DDIwR vignette.

Reviewability & Unit Testing

The human peer-review of output from many surveys is very difficult due to the high dimensionality of the harmonized survey datasets. We would like to support review with several forms of unit testing and automation. See Reviewability & Unit Testing for further details.

Under the Hood

For further details, see Dependencies: Other R packages Used vignette.