declare_attributes: Declare 'peacesciencer'-specific attributes to data

In peacesciencer: Tools and Data for Quantitative Peace Science Research

Declare peacesciencer-specific attributes to data

Description

declare_attributes() allows the user to declare peacesciencer-specific attributes to data they bring from outside the package. This allows the user to use package functions as shortcuts, where appropriate.

Usage

declare_attributes(data, data_type, system, conflict_type)

Arguments

data	a data frame for which you want peacesciencer-specific attributes
data_type	optional, but a character vector of length 1 coinciding with the type of data the user believes the data frame is. Options include: 'dyad_year', 'leader_day', 'leader_year', 'leader_dyad_year', 'state_day', or 'state_year'.
system	optional, but a character vector of length 1 coinciding with the state system of the data. If specified at all, must be 'cow' or 'gw'.
conflict_type	optional, and applicable to just conflict data and the "whittle" class functions in peacesciencer. If specified, must be a character vector of length 1 that is either 'cow' or 'gml'.

Details

The function's documentation will include what attributes are available to be declared. No doubt, the list of potential attributes will grow in time, but the attributes that can be declared are limited to just what I've built into the package to this point. Users cannot declare more than one attribute of a given type (i.e. a user cannot declare the system to be both Correlates of War and Gleditsch-Ward).

The idea here is, basically, to allow the user to use functions in peacesciencer for data they have created or have acquired from elsewhere. However, this functions provides no assurances about quality control in the various merges built elsewhere into this package. This package aggressively tests functions for data generated in-house. If your outside data have merges, the various "add" functions may not perfectly perform. There is no real way I can control for this since the data are coming from outside the package and not through one of the "create" functions. In your particular case, that may not be much of a problem. However, it's the user's responsibility to do their own quality control in this situation.

Value

declare_attributes() takes a data frame and adds peacesciencer-specific attributes to the data frame. This will allow the user to take advantage of many of the functions in this package without starting the process with one of the "create" functions. If nothing is declared in the function, no attribute is added and the function just returns the original data without any change.

Author(s)

Steven V. Miller

Examples

# just call `library(tidyverse)` at the top of the your script
library(magrittr)

data.frame(ccode = 2, year = c(1816:1830)) -> usa_years

usa_years %>% declare_attributes(data_type = 'state_year', system = 'cow')

peacesciencer documentation built on March 31, 2023, 8:37 p.m.