scaleInspection: scaleInspection and a number of useful helper functions
In userfriendlyscience: Quantitative Analysis Made Accessible

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Author(s) Examples

scaleInspection is a function to generate a PDF with information to diagnose and inspect scales (aggregate measures); makeScales actually generates the scales; and meanConfInt and sdConfInt provide confidence intervals for means and standard deviations.

scaleInspection(dat, items = NULL,
                docTitle = "Scale inspection", docAuthor = "Author",
                pdfLaTexPath, rnwPath=getwd(),
                filename = "scaleInspection", convertFactors=TRUE,
                scaleReliability.ci=FALSE, conf.level=.95, digits=2,
                rMatrixColsLandscape = 6,
                pboxWidthMultiplier = 1,
                scatterPlotBaseSize = 4,
                pageMargins=15, show=FALSE,
                pval=TRUE)
makeScales(dat, scales, append=TRUE)
meanConfInt(vector=NULL, mean=NULL, sd=NULL, n=NULL, se=NULL, conf.level=.95)
sdConfInt(vector=NULL, sd=NULL, n=NULL, conf.level=.95)

`dat`	Dataframe containing the items of the relevant scale
`items`	Either a character vector with the itemnames, or, if the items are organised in scales, a list of character vectors with the items in each scale.
`scales`	A list of character vectors with the items in each scale, where each vectors' name is the name of the scale.
`docTitle`	Title to use when generating the PDF.
`docAuthor`	Author(s) to include when generating the PDF.
`pdfLaTexPath`	The path to PdfLaTex. This file is part of a LaTeX installation that creates a pdf out of a .tex file. In Windows, you can download (portable) MikTex from http://miktex.org/portable. You then decide yourself where to install MikTex; pdflatex will end up in a subfolder 'miktex\bin', so if you installed MikTex in, for example, 'C:\Program Files\MikTex', the total path becomes 'C:\Program Files\MikTex\miktex\bin'. Note that R uses slashes instead of backslashes to separate folders, so in this example, pdfLaTexPath should be 'C:/Program Files/MikTex/miktex/bin' In MacOS, you can install MacTex from http://tug.org/mactex/ By default, pdflatex ends up in folder '/user/texbin', which is what pdfLaTexPath should be in that default case. In Ubuntu, you can install TexLive base by using your package manager to install texlive-latex-base, or using the terminal: 'sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base' In ubuntu, by default pdflatex ends un in folder '/usr/bin', which is what pdfLaTexPath should be in that default case.
`rnwPath`	The path where the temporary files and the resulting PDF should be stored.
`filename`	The filename to use to save the pdf.
`convertFactors`	Whether to convert factors to numeric vectors for the analysis.
`scaleReliability.ci`	TRUE or FALSE: whether to compute confidence intervals for Cronbach's Alpha and Omega (uses bootstrapping function in MBESS, takes a while).
`conf.level`	Confidence of confidence intervals (for reliability estimates (if requested with scaleReliability.ci), meand, and sd, for respectively scaleInspection, meanConfInt and sdConfInt).
`digits`	The number of digits to use in the tables.
`rMatrixColsLandscape`	At how many columns (or rather, variables) or more should rMatrices be printed landscape?
`pboxWidthMultiplier`	Used for print.rMatrix; used to tweak the width of columns in the correlation matrix.
`scatterPlotBaseSize`	Size of one scatterplot in the scattermatrix in centimeters. If the total scattermatrix becomes larger than 18 cm, it's scaled down to 18 cm.
`pageMargins`	Margins of the page in millimeters.
`show`	Whether to show the results (or only write them to the PDF).
`pval`	Whether to print p-values as p-values in correlation matrix.
`append`	Whether to return the dataframe including the new variables (`TRUE`), or a dataframe with only those new variables (`FALSE`).
`vector`	Numeric vector to use when computing confidence intervals.
`mean`	Mean to use when computing confidence intervals (when no vector is provided).
`sd`	Standard deviaton to use when computing confidence intervals (when no vector is provided).
`n`	Number of datapoints to base confidence intervals on.
`se`	Standard errorto use when computing confidence intervals (when no standard deviation or vector is provided).

scaleInspection generates a PDF with useful diagnostics to assess a scale; those from scaleDiagnosis and an rMatrix.

makeScales generates the scales and stores them in the dataframe.

meanConfInt and sdConfInt just compute and return a confidence interval for a mean or standard deviation.

scaleInspection returns nothing; it just generates a PDF.

makeScales returns the provided dataframe, now including the new scale variables.

meanConfInt and sdConfInt return an object, with in its 'output' list, the confidence interval for a mean or standard deviation.

Gjalt-Jorn Peters

Maintainer: Gjalt-Jorn Peters <gjalt-jorn@userfriendlyscience.com>

## Not run: 
scaleInspection(mtcars, items=c('disp', 'hp', 'drat'), pdfLaTexPath="valid/path/here");

## End(Not run)

newDataframe <- makeScales(mtcars, list(senselessScale = c('disp', 'hp', 'drat')));

sdConfInt(sd=4, n=30);

meanConfInt(mean=5, sd=4, n=30)