declared

The goal of declared is to improve the functionality of imported social science microdata, particularly labelled data. While there are excellent packages available for these purposes, such as haven and labelled, they have some fundamental design features that run, in some situations, against users' expectations. This has a lot to do with the treatment of declared missing values, that are instrumental for the social sciences. The aim of declared is to offer an alternative class called "declared", whilst ensuring as much compatibility as possible with these popular packages.

Installation

The development version of package declared can be installed using this command:

install.packages("declared", repos = "dusadrian.r-universe.dev")

Example

library(haven)
x1 <- labelled_spss(
  x = c(1:5, -91),
  labels = c("Missing" = -91),
  na_value = -91
)

print(x1)
#> <labelled_spss<double>[6]>
#> [1]   1   2   3   4   5 -91
#> Missing values: -91
#> 
#> Labels:
#>  value   label
#>    -91 Missing

mean(x1)
#> [1] -12.66667

Instead of using the labelled::labelled() class or its inherited version in haven, the declared package offers a similar class that behaves more as it is expected–because it interprets certain “missing” values NA codes as existing, declared missing values.

library(declared)
x2 <- declared(
  x = c(1:5, -91),
  labels = c("Missing" = -91),
  na_value = -91
)

print(x2)
#> <declared<integer>[6]>
#> [1]       1       2       3       4       5 NA(-91)
#> Missing values: -91
#> 
#> Labels:
#>  value   label
#>    -91 Missing

mean(x2)
#> [1] 3