cps_refactor: combine factor levels across years
In cpsvote: A Toolbox for Using the CPS’s Voting and Registration Supplement

Description Usage Arguments Details Examples

The response sets in certain CPS questions change between years. This function consolidates several of these response sets across years (and fixes typos from the CPS documentation), specifically race, Hispanic status, duration of residency, reason for not voting, and method of registration. Additionally, this creates a new column VRS_VOTEMETHOD_CON which consolidates multiple expressions of vote method across years (By Mail, Early, and Election Day) into one variable.

1	cps_refactor(data, move_levels = TRUE)

`data`	A dataset containing already-labelled CPS data
`move_levels`	Whether to move the levels "OTHER", "DON'T KNOW", and "REFUSED" to the end of each factor's level set

While consolidating response sets across multiple surveys can be fraught with peril, this function attempts to combine disparate levels for race and other CPS variable across multiple years. Some of these are relatively straightforward typos fixes ("NON-HIPSANIC" should clearly match "NON-HISPANIC"), but others have differing degrees of subjectivity applied. Take this function with a grain of salt, as it depends on some exact variable names you may or may not be using, and recode variables as needed for your own uses. To explore exactly how these variables were recoded, you can run table(data$RACE, cps_refactor(data)$RACE) in the console, substituting your column of interest in for RACE.