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Opens a connection to an ELS data file and returns an edsurvey.data.frame with information about the file and data.

Usage

readELS(
  path = getwd(),
  filename = "els_02_12_byf3pststu_v1_0.sav",
  wgtFilename = ifelse(filename == "els_02_12_byf3pststu_v1_0.sav",
    "els_02_12_byf3stubrr_v1_0.sav", NA),
  forceReread = FALSE,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

path

a character value to the directory path of the extracted set of data files and layout files.

filename

a character value of the name of the SPSS (.sav) data file in the specified path to be read.

wgtFilename

a character value of the name of the associated balanced repeated replication (BRR) weight SPSS (.sav) data file in the specified path to be read. This argument is applicable only for the student-level data, which contains a separate data file containing the weight replicate information. If using default filenames (recommended), then you shouldn't need to specify this parameter because it will inspect the filename argument. For data files with no BRR weight file associated, specify a value of NULL or NA.

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 readELS function is running to indicate processing progress. The default value is TRUE.

Value

an edsurvey.data.frame for the ELS longitudinal dataset

Details

Reads in the unzipped files downloaded from the ELS longitudinal dataset(s) to an edsurvey.data.frame. The ELS 2002 study consisted of four distinct separate datasets that cannot be combined:

  • Student: bas -year through follow-up three (default)

  • School: base year through follow-up one

  • Institution: follow-up two

  • Institution: follow-up three

Author

Tom Fink

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# read-in student file including weight file as default
els_df <- readELS("~/ELS/2002") #student level with weights)
d <- getData(data=els_df, varnames=c("stu_id", "bysex", "bystlang"))
summary(d)



# read-in with parameters specified (student level with weights)
els_wgt_df <- readELS(path = "~/ELS/2002", 
                      filename = "els_02_12_byf3pststu_v1_0.sav", 
                      wgtFilename = "els_02_12_byf3stubrr_v1_0.sav",
                      verbose = TRUE, 
                      forceReread = FALSE)

# read-in with parameters specified (school level, no separate weight replicate file)
els_sch_df <- readELS(path = "~/ELS/2002", 
                      filename = "els_02_12_byf1sch_v1_0.sav", 
                      wgtFilename = NA,
                      verbose = TRUE, 
                      forceReread = FALSE)
} # }