platform_define_survey: Describe a survey of a platform and register it

In cturbelin/ifnBase: InfluenzaNet Data Analysis Base

Describe a survey of a platform and register it

Description

Describe configuration of a survey and the mapping from DB names & coding to R names & factor levels. A call to this function is needed to register a survey in the package before to use other survey functions. Usually it is done in the platform definition file, which is loaded by load_platform() function

Usage

platform_define_survey(
  name,
  survey_id = NULL,
  table = NULL,
  mapping = list(),
  labels = NULL,
  codes = NULL,
  recodes = list(),
  single.table = FALSE,
  geo.column = NULL,
  template = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

name	unique name of the survey
survey_id	id of the survey in the database
table	name of the default table storing response of the survey
mapping	Mapping from DB names (in value) and R names for each survey variables.
labels	list of labels
codes	list of codes *deprecated*
recodes	list of recoding
single.table	boolean, TRUE if survey uses single table model
geo.column	name of the variable (R names)
template	name of the template to override
...	extra parameters to set for the survey

Value

invisibly return the survey_definition object

Mapping

The mapping allows to automatically transform db names to R names (more meaningfull and error-proof) each times data are loaded using 'survey_load_results()'

Recoding

for each variable, it is possible to give a list(label1=code1, label2=code2) where 'code1', 'code2' will be recoded to the corresponding label The idea is to give a human meaningful label to each numeric code used to store response value for questions based on an option list.

It is a good pratice to use variable style names (character + dot), without space and in english. Those labels could be translated later to another language in the analysis output (graphs, tables & so on). This aimed to produced shareable and language agnostic programs. For a given questions, all options should also start with the same prefix to allow quick selection of theses labels based on patterns

For example: main.activity = c('activity.fulltime'='0','activity.partial'='1','activity.self'='2', 'activity.student'='3','activity.home'='4','activity.unemployed'='5','activity.sick'='6','activity.retired'='7', 'activity.other'=8),

Will describe recoding for the question named 'main.activity' (using attributed name, never the DB name).

Labels

labels are named list of labels (a label is just a character string). It is used to manipulate list of names for various purposes : list for variables for multi-valued questions (from "checkboxes"), a label provide a "name" to identify the list of all variables corresponding to one question. It is also used to get the list of recoded labels for a qualitative question.

One of common labels is "symptoms" in weekly survey definition, providing the list of the variables names for symptoms question.

See Also

survey_definition()

survey_recode

Other platform: create_survey_definition(), load_platform(), platform_import()

cturbelin/ifnBase documentation built on Nov. 5, 2023, 12:54 p.m.