Connect to ECLS–K 1998 Data

Opens a connection to an ECLS–K 1998 data file and returns an edsurvey.data.frame with information about the file and data.

Usage

readECLS_K1998(
  path = getwd(),
  filename = "eclsk_98_99_k8_child_v1_0.dat",
  layoutFilename = "Layout_k8_child.txt",
  forceReread = FALSE,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

path: a character value to the full directory path(s) to the ECLS–K-extracted fixed-width-format (.dat) set of data files
filename: a character value of the name of the fixed-width (.dat) data file in the specified path to be read
layoutFilename: a character value of the filename of either the ASCII (.txt) layout file of the filename within the specified path or a character value of the filename of the SPSS syntax (.sps) layout file of the filename within the specified path
forceReread: a logical value to force rereading of all processed data. The default value of FALSE will speed up the read function by using existing read-in data already processed.
verbose: a logical value that will determine if you want verbose output while the readECLS-K1998 function is running to indicate processing progress. The default value is TRUE.

Value

an edsurvey.data.frame for the ECLS–K 1998 longitudinal dataset

Details

Reads in the unzipped files downloaded from the ECLS–K 1998 longitudinal dataset(s) to an edsurvey.data.frame. The ECLS–K 1998–99 study consisted of three distinct separate datasets that cannot be combined: (1) Child Grades K–8 Data, (2) School Base-Year Data, and (3) Teacher Base-Year Data. The filename and layoutFilename arguments default to the corresponding Child K–8 default filenames.

Author

Tom Fink

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# read-in student file with defaults
eclsk_df <- readECLS_K1998(path="~/ECLS_K/1998") #using defaults
d <- getData(data=eclsk_df, varnames=c("childid", "gender", "race"))
summary(d)
} # }

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# read-in with parameters specified
eclsk_df <- readECLS_K1998(path = "~/ECLS_K/1998", 
                           filename = "eclsk_98_99_k8_child_v1_0.dat", 
                           layoutFilename = "Layout_k8_child.txt", 
                           verbose = TRUE, 
                           forceReread = FALSE)
} # }