In ctesta01/QualtricsTools: Automating Qualtrics Survey Processing

QualtricsTools not only makes it easy to create reports of text appendices, but also to create text appendices with frequency reports of categorized "coded comments." The coded comments must follow a standardized format, containing the "ResponseID" in the first column, and a column titled "varname" past which each column title represents a category which have "1" entries in cells to represent a respondent's response being categorized into the given category.

An example of a coded comments document is included in the QualtricsTools package. In the prescribed workflow, each individual text entry component of a survey which needs to be categorized must have a corresponding coded comments xlsx file in a directory. However, in this example we will only use coded comments for a single text entry component.

First, let's download the data into a directory.

library(shiny)
library(QualtricsTools)
library(RCurl)

# Grab the sample survey data from our repository.
qsf <- getURL("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emmamorgan-tufts/QualtricsTools/master/data/Sample%20Surveys/Better%20Sample%20Survey/Better_Sample_Survey.qsf")
csv <- getURL("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emmamorgan-tufts/QualtricsTools/master/data/Sample%20Surveys/Better%20Sample%20Survey/Better_Sample_Survey.csv")

# Write the sample survey data to file.
qsf_tempfile_path = tempfile()
csv_tempfile_path = tempfile()
write(x = qsf, file = qsf_tempfile_path)
write(x = csv, file = csv_tempfile_path)

# Download the sample coded comments
url <- "https://github.com/emmamorgan-tufts/QualtricsTools/blob/master/data/Sample%20Surveys/Comment%20Coding/Coded%20Comments/Q5%20Coded.xlsx?raw=true"
coded_comments_directory <- file.path(tempdir(), basename(tempfile(pattern="")))
dir.create(path = coded_comments_directory)
filename <- "Q5 Coded.xlsx"
coded_comments_filepath <- file.path(coded_comments_directory, filename)
download.file(url, coded_comments_filepath, mode="wb")

Just to make clear what the formatting of the Coded Comments should be, here's the file we just downloaded.

df <- readxl::read_xlsx(coded_comments_filepath)
options(knitr.kable.NA = '')
knitr::kable(df, format='markdown')

output_filepath <- make_coded_comments(
  qsf_path = qsf_tempfile_path,
  csv_path = csv_tempfile_path,
  headerrows = 3, 
  sheets_dir = coded_comments_directory,
  n_threshold = 0,
  filename = "ExampleHTMLCodedComments.html"
)

# We use the includeHTML function from the shiny package to 
# render the HTML output.
includeHTML(output_filepath)

The n_threshold parameter which is passed above as 0 is the threshold for which coded comments frequency tables with a total number of responses less than n_threshold are not included. The parameter defaults to 15 if it is not specified. For example, when we render the report with the n_threshold = 15 default parameter we see that the coded comments frequency table is not included in the report:

output_filepath <- make_coded_comments(
  qsf_path = qsf_tempfile_path,
  csv_path = csv_tempfile_path,
  headerrows = 3, 
  sheets_dir = coded_comments_directory,
  filename = "ExampleHTMLCodedComments.html"
)

shiny::includeHTML(output_filepath)