to_factor not working as expected?

[aniruhil]

Starting with a clean R session, running RStudio 1.1.39 and R 3.3.2 on OS X Sierra, I was playing with to_factor() but the output differs from that expected. What could be going on here? I also reinstalled sjmisc via devtools so can't be a package version issue.

> library(sjmisc)
> data(efc)
> str(efc$e42dep)

atomic [1:908] 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ...

• attr(*, "label")= chr "elder's dependency"
• attr(, "labels")= Named num [1:4] 1 2 3 4
  ..- attr(, "names")= chr [1:4] "independent" "slightly dependent" "moderately dependent" "severely dependent"

> table(to_factor(efc$e42dep))

1 2 3 4
66 225 306 304

> barplot(table(to_factor(efc$e42dep)))

The code below works though with the output in line with the documentation:

library(sjPlot)
efc$c172code <- to_factor(efc$c172code)
fit <- lm(barthtot ~ c160age + c12hour + c172code + c161sex, data = efc)
sjt.lm(fit, group.pred = TRUE)

[sjPlot]

What would you expect as output? :-)

to_factor() converts a numeric vector into a factor with numeric levels, but keeps the value and variable labels (which get lost when using as.factor()). If you want the value labels set as factor levels, use to_label().

[aniruhil]

ah thanks, I messed up with using to_factor() instead of to_label(). love the package; many thanks!

[sjPlot]

There are some tutorials, which might be worth merging into one document (see also #43 for this):

http://strengejacke.de/sjPlot/sjmisc/

http://strengejacke.de/sjPlot/labelleddata/

https://strengejacke.wordpress.com/2016/12/22/exploring-the-european-social-survey-ess-pipe-friendly-workflow-with-sjmisc-part-2-rstats-tidyverse/