jmobrien / qualtdict

Generate variable dictionaries from Qualtrics surveys and download labelled survey data

qualtdict

License: MIT

Qualtrics is an online survey and data collection software platform. The qualtdict package builds on the qualtRics R package which implements the retrieval of survey data using the Qualtrics API. The current package makes more comprehensive use of the survey metadata and generates a variable dictionary inlucding most of the information essential for data processing and analysis. It also uses a modified version of the RAKE (Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/978967) algorithm implemented in the package slowraker to generate meaningful names for variables in the survey, as well as using the sjlabelled package to add a comprehensive set of metadata attributes that uniquely identifies each variable.

Installation

This package is in an early stage of development and can be installed with the devtools package.

Note that the package currently depends on my own fork of the qualtRics package (the pull requests of which I have submitted).

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("lyh970817/qualtRics", ref = "qualtdict")
devtools::install_github("lyh970817/qultdict")

A demo workflow

You need to first register your Qualtrics credentials with the function qualtrics_api_credentials exported from the package qualtRics.

library(qualtdict)

qualtrics_api_credentials(api_key = "<YOUR-QUALTRICS_API_KEY>",
                          base_url = "<YOUR-QUALTRICS_BASE_URL>",
                          install = TRUE)

You can then generate a variable dictionary with a Qualtrics survey ID.

mydict <- dict_generate("SV_4YyAHbAxpdbzacl", var_name = "question_name")

You may wish to generate meaningful variable names (if you don’t already have them in the survey) from various text elements (question text, item and label) in the survey.

If doing so, preferably you would also want to define a function that extracts block prefixes from block names.

# Define a block prefix extraction function

block_pattern <- function(x) {
  substring(x, 1, 3)
}

mydict <- dict_generate("SV_4YyAHbAxpdbzacl",
  var_name = "easy_name",
  block_pattern = block_pattern,
  block_sep = "."
)

You could validate (check for potential mistakes in) the dictionary.

dict_validate(mydict)

And download labelled survey data with the dictionary.

survey_dat <- get_survey_data(mydict,
  unanswer_recode = -77,
  unanswer_recode_multi = 0
)