I had a similar survey, and ended up stuffing everything into one field using the bitops library.
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 4:18 AM, jeroen00ms <jeroen.o...@stat.ucla.edu>wrote: > I am working on a system to visualize survey responses. Survey responses > typically include factors, numeric, timestamps, textfields and therefore > fit > perfectly nice in dataframes, making it easy to visualize using standard R > functions. > > However I am currently working on a survey that also include questions in > which the respondent can check more than one answer on a single multichoice > item. I.e. this represents a factor for which every row has multiple > responses. I am looking for a way to put this into a dataframe together > with > the other questions of the survey. > > I considered three workarounds, but both are problematic: > > - Column-wise expanding: convert a single multi-choice item into N binary > column factors for every possible response (level) with 1/0 values > representing if the answer was checked or not. Problem with this is that > you > lose the information that these N columns are in fact one question and it > becomes very hard to vizualise this single question. > > - Row wise expanding: convert a single response into N rows, one for every > response. Problem with this is that if the factor is part of the dataframe, > also all of the other items have to be duplicated, leading to artificial > results. > > I was wondering if there is a more natural datastructure to put a > multi-choice item into a dataframe? Some code for illustration: > > people <- list( > name=c("John", "Mary", "Jennifer", "Neil"), > gender=factor(c("M","F","F","M")), > age=c(34,23,40,30), > residence=sapply(list("US", c("US", "CA"), "MX", c("MX", "US", "CA")), > factor, levels=c("US", "CA", "MX")) > ); > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/datastructure-for-multi-choice-factors-tp3650940p3650940.html > Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.