Download SDDF data by round for countries from the European Social Survey

Download SDDF data by round for countries from the European Social Survey

Usage

import_sddf_country(country, rounds, ess_email = NULL, format = NULL)

import_all_sddf_cntrounds(country, ess_email = NULL, format = NULL)

download_sddf_country(
  country,
  rounds,
  ess_email = NULL,
  output_dir = getwd(),
  format = "stata"
)

Arguments

country

a character of length 1 with the full name of the country. Use show_countries for a list of available countries.

rounds

a numeric vector with the rounds to download. See show_sddf_cntrounds for all available rounds for any given country.

ess_email

a character vector with your email, such as "your_email@email.com". If you haven't registered in the ESS website, create an account at http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/user/new. A preferred method is to login through set_email.

format

the format from which to download the data. By default it is NULL for import_* functions and tries to read 'stata', 'spss' and 'sas' in the specific order. This can be useful if some countries don't have a particular format available. Alternatively, the user can specify the format which can either be 'stata', 'spss' or 'sas'. For the download_* functions it is set to 'stata' because the format should be specified before downloading. Setting it to NULL will iterate over 'stata', 'spss' and 'sas' and download the first that is available. When using import_country the data will be downloaded and read in the format specified. For download_country, the data is downloaded from the specified format (only 'spss' and 'stata' supported, see details).

output_dir

a character vector with the output directory in case you want to only download the files using download_sddf_country. Defaults to your working directory. This will be interpreted as a directory and not a path with a file name.

Value

for import_sddf_country if length(rounds) is 1, it returns a tibble with the latest version of that round. Otherwise it returns a list of length(rounds) containing the latest version of each round. For download_sddf_country, if output_dir is a valid directory, it returns the saved directories invisibly and saves all the rounds in the chosen format in output_dir

Details

SDDF data (Sample Design Data Files) are data sets that contain additional columns with the sample design and weights for a given country in a given round. These additional columns are required to perform any complex weighted analysis of the ESS data. Users interested in using this data should read the description of SDDF files here and should read here for the sampling design of the country of analysis for that specific round.

Use import_sddf_country to download the SDDF data by country into R. import_all_sddf_cntrounds will download all available SDDF data for a given country by default and download_sddf_country will download SDDF data and save them in a specified format in the supplied directory.

The format argument from import_country should not matter to the user because the data is read into R either way. However, different formats might have different handling of the encoding of some questions. This option was preserved so that the user can switch between formats if any encoding errors are found in the data. For more details see the discussion here.

Additionally, given that the SDDF data is not very complete, some countries do not have SDDF data in Stata or SPSS formats. For that reason, the format argument is not used in import_sddf_country. Internally, Stata is chosen over SPSS and SPSS over SAS in that order of preference.

For this particular argument, 'sas' is not supported because the data formats have changed between ESS waves and separate formats require different functions to be read. To preserve parsimony and format errors between waves, the user should use 'stata' or 'spss'.

Starting from round 7 (including), the ESS switched the layout of SDDF data. Before the rounds, SDDF data was published separately by wave-country combination. From round 7 onwards, all SDDF data is released as a single integrated file with all countries combined for that given round. import_sddf_country takes care of this nuance by reading the data and filtering the chosen country automatically. download_sddf_country downloads the raw file but also reads the data into memory to subset the specific country requested. This process should be transparent to the user but beware that reading/writing the data might delete some of it's properties such as dropping the labels or label attribute.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{

set_email("your_email@email.com")

sp_three <- import_sddf_country("Spain", 5:6)

show_sddf_cntrounds("Spain")

# Only download the files, this will return nothing

temp_dir <- tempdir()

download_sddf_country(
 "Spain",
 rounds = 5:6,
 output_dir = temp_dir
)

# By default, download_sddf_country downloads 'stata' files but
# you can also download 'spss' or 'sas' files.

download_sddf_country(
 "Spain",
 rounds = 1:8,
 output_dir = temp_dir,
 format = 'spss'
)

} # }