Connect to BTLS Data

Opens a connection to the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study (BTLS) waves 1 through 5 data file and returns an edsurvey.data.frame with information about the file and data.

Usage

readBTLS(dat_FilePath, spss_FilePath, verbose = TRUE)

Arguments

dat_FilePath: a character value to the full path of the BTLS fixed-width (.dat) data file
spss_FilePath: a character value to the full path of the SPSS syntax file to process the dat_FilePath
verbose: a logical value that will determine if you want verbose output while the readBTLS function is running to indicate processing progress (the default value is TRUE)

Value

an edsurvey.data.frame for the BTLS waves 1 to 5 longitudinal dataset.

Details

Reads the spss_FilePath file to parse the dat_FilePath to an edsurvey.data.frame. There is no cached data because the dat_FilePath format already is in fixed-width format.

Author

Tom Fink

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{

fld <- "~/EdSurveyData/BTLS"
datPath <- file.path(fld, "ASCII Data File", "BTLS2011_12.dat")
spsPath <- file.path(fld, "Input Syntax for Stata and SPSS", "BTLS2011_12.sps")

#read in the data to an edsurvey.data.frame
btls <- readBTLS(datPath, spsPath, verbose = TRUE)

dim(btls)
} # }