Drop unwanted answer categories from a question

Removes specific answer values – typically catch-all or uninformative options such as "Other", "Don't know" or "Not applicable" – by turning them into NA, so they fall out of counts, percentages and charts and the remaining percentages re-base on the answers you keep. The companion to na_blank() (which targets blanks and standard non-answers): use drop_items() for the substantive categories you simply do not want to show.

Usage

drop_items(x, items, trim = TRUE)

Arguments

x

A character (or factor) vector.

items

Character vector of exact answer values to drop. Matching is case-insensitive.

trim

Whether to trim surrounding whitespace before comparing. Defaults to TRUE.

Value

A character vector the same length as x, with any value matching items replaced by NA.

Details

x is coerced to character (so factors are handled) and, by default, whitespace-trimmed; any value equal (ignoring case) to one of items becomes NA. The summary helpers (calc_percentage(), calc_percentage_multi(), calc_percentage_batch()) and crosstab() take a drop = argument that applies this for you before counting, so the kept answers re-base to ~100%; set a session-wide default with ezrsurvey_options(drop_answers = ...).

See also

na_blank(), calc_percentage().

Other recode: add_region(), bin_numeric(), clean_label(), ensure_numeric(), generation_scheme(), na_blank(), nps_group(), recode_age(), recode_generation(), recode_likert(), recode_region(), split_multi()

Examples

drop_items(c("Yes", "No", "Other", "Don't know"),
           items = c("Other", "Don't know"))
#> [1] "Yes" "No"  NA    NA