Introduction to qualitative data

Categorical Data in the Tidyverse

Emily Robinson

Data Scientist

Course overview

Identifying and inspecting qualitative variables
Working with the forcats package
Making effective visualizations

Final chapter

A bar graph titled "hell is other people in a pressurized metal tube" with the caption "percentage of 874 air-passenger respondents who said action is very or somewhat rude." The biggest bar is "knowingly bring unruly children" at 82% and the lowest is "ask to switch seats for family" at 17%. There are 9 bars in total. This survey is from FiveThirtyEight and was done on SurveyMonkey.

41% of Fliers Think You're Rude if You Recline Your Seat

What are qualitative variables?

Categorical vs. Ordinal data

Categorical (nominal) data

Stock image of 7 workers with various outfits.

Ordinal data

Annual Income Options:

"0-$50,000"
"$50,000-150,000"
"$150,000-500,000"
"More than $500,000"

Qualitative variables in R

Names vs. question on programming languages

Qualitative variables in R

Look at your whole dataset

library(fivethirtyeight)
print(college_all_ages)

# A tibble: 173 x 11
   major_code major       major_category     total employed
        <int> <chr>       <chr>              <int>    <int>
 1       1100 General Ag… Agriculture & Na… 128148    90245
 2       1101 Agricultur… Agriculture & Na…  95326    76865
 3       1102 Agricultur… Agriculture & Na…  33955    26321
 4       1103 Animal Sci… Agriculture & Na… 103549    81177
# ... with 163 more rows, and 6 more variables:
#   employed_fulltime_yearround <int>, unemployed <int>,
#   unemployment_rate <dbl>, p25th <dbl>, median <dbl>,
#   p75th <dbl>

Qualitative variables in R

Look at your variables one at a time:

is.factor(college_all_ages$major_category)

FALSE

Let's practice!

Categorical Data in the Tidyverse