Introduction

Web tool for viewing union membership and union contract coverage among registered nurses in the United States using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). The tool is currently hosted at the following location:

https://bnoland.shinyapps.io/nurses_web_tool/

General usage

For instructions on how to use the web tool read the included documentation, located under docs/docs.pdf.

Setting things up

To set up the web tool, first clone or download this repository. Included alongside the code is an RStudio project. Using RStudio is perhaps the easiest way to modify the code, update the underlying data, deploy the web tool, and so forth.

Directory structure

• raw_data/ contains zip files of the raw CPS microdata files, obtainable from the CPS microdata page:

  https://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/ftp/cps_ftp.html?#

• data/ contains the processed data (including the data used directly by the web tool).

• tests/ contains regression tests which can be run using the shinytest package.

• docs/ contains the documentation for the web tool (including the LaTeX source).

Preparing the data

Several steps are required for preparing raw CPS data for use with the web tool:

• First, the data needs to be downloaded in the form of zip files from the CPS microdata page and placed under raw_data/.

• Next, the raw data needs to be extracted from the zip files under raw_data/. This process consists of extracting the pertinent variables from the raw CPS files and merging the data into the single file data/nurses_raw.csv. This is accomplished by running the script get_raw_data.R. Note that the raw CPS data is in fixed-width format, and so this script needs to be updated accordingly if the format specification changes.

• Finally, the data needs to be transformed into a format usable directly by the web tool. This is accomplished by running the script preprocess_raw_data.R. The resulting data is stored in the file data/nurses_preprocessed.csv.

See the scripts get_raw_data.R and preprocess_raw_data.R for more details.

Running the regression tests

These are stored under tests/, and need to be run using the shinytest package:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/shinytest/index.html

Make sure the shinytest package is installed. Once you have it installed, you can run all the tests at once using the commands

library(shinytest)
testApp()

You should run the tests before you deploy the web tool every time you modify the code or data, or if any of the packages used by the web tool are updated.

Deploying to the web

To deploy the web tool to https://www.shinyapps.io/, first make sure that the rsconnect package is installed and properly configured. Once you've done this, deploying the web tool is as simple as running the command

rsconnect::deployApp(appFileManifest = "manifest")

The named argument appFileManifest = "manifest" specifies the a manifest file containing the names of the files to be deployed to the server. In this case, the file is simply named manifest, and is contained in the top-level directory of the repository.

Licensing

The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

A copy of this license is available in the file LICENSE.