lsa.vars.dict: Produce dictionary for large-scale assessments data variables

Description

Utility function to display dictionaries of variables from data sets containing objects of class lsa.data.

Usage

lsa.vars.dict(
  data.file,
  data.object,
  var.names,
  out.file,
  open.out.file = FALSE
)

Value

The dictionaries for the variables in var.names will be printed as tables on the screen. For each variable the dictionaries contain the variable name, the variable class, the variable label, unique variable values (see below) and the user-defined missing values (if any).

The unique values' representation will depend on the variable class. If the variable is a factor, the factor levels will be displayed. If the variable is numeric or character, the unique values will be printed up to the sixth one.

The user-defined missing values for factor variables will be as text strings. For the numeric variables these will be integers, followed by their labels in brackets.

If a full file path is provided to the out.file, the same output will be written to a .txt file with a text on top which data file/object was used.

Arguments

data.file: Full path to the .RData file containing lsa.data object. Either this or data.object shall be specified, but not both. See details.
data.object: The object in the memory containing lsa.data object. Either this or data.file shall be specified, but not both. See details.
var.names: Vector of variable names whose dictionaries shall be produced. See details.
out.file: Optional, full path to a .txt file where the dictionaries shall be saved, if needed. See details.
open.out.file: Optional, if file path is provided to out.file shall the produced file be open after the file is written?

Details

Either data.file or data.object shall be provided as source of data. If both of them are provided, the function will stop with an error message.

If var.names are not provided, then the function will produce dictionaries for all variables in the file/object.

The function will print the dictionaries on the screen. If these need to be saved to a file for further reference as well, a full path to the .txt file shall be provided. If the file exists, it will be overwritten. If the file name is provided to out.file and open.out.file = TRUE, it will be automatically open in the default text editor after being written.

Examples

Run this code

# Display and write to file the dictionaries for multiple factor and numeric variables using
# PIRLS 2016 file with teacher and student data from several countries and open the file after
# it has been written to the disk.
if (FALSE) {
lsa.vars.dict(data.file = "C:/temp/test.RData", var.names = c("ASBG10A", "ASBG10B", "ASBG05A",
"ASBG05B", "ASBG05C", "ASBG05D", "ASBG05E", "ASBG05F", "ASBG05G", "ASBG05H", "ASBG06",
"ASBG07A", "ASBG07B", "ASBG08", "ATBG05BA", "ATBG05BB", "ATBG05BC", "ATBG05BD"),
out.file = "C:/temp/dict.txt", open.out.file = TRUE)
}

if (FALSE) {
lsa.vars.dict(data.object = test, var.names = c("ASBG10A", "ASBG10B", "ASBG05A", "ASBG05B",
"ASBG05C", "ASBG05D", "ASBG05E", "ASBG05F", "ASBG05G", "ASBG05H","ASBG06", "ASBG07A",
"ASBG07B", "ASBG08", "ATBG05BA", "ATBG05BB", "ATBG05BC", "ATBG05BD"),
out.file = "C:/temp/dict.txt", open.out.file = TRUE)
}