Hello R folks.

1) The question that generated the data, which I call Qx:
Which of the following 5 items have you performed in the past month?  (multipe response)

2) How the data is coded in my current dataframe:
The first item that a person selected is coded under a field called Qxfirst; the second selected under Qxsecond, etc.  For the first Person, the NAs mean that that person only selected two of the five items.

Hypothetical data is shown

                    Qxfirst    Qxsecond    Qxthird    Qxfourth    Qxfifth
Person1        4            2                NA            NA            NA
Person2        1            3                4               5               NA
Person3        3            2                NA            NA            NA

3) How I want the data to be be coded:

I want each field to be one of the five items and I want each field to contain a 1 or 0 code--1 if they mentioned the item, 0 otherwise.

Given the above data, the new fields would look as follows:

                    Item1    Item2        Item3            Item4        Item5
Person1        0            1               0                1               0  
Person2        1            0               1                1               1              
Person3        0            1               1                0               0     

I know how to do this using brute force (by writing bunch of ifelse statements), but given I have quite a lot of data in the above format, I was hoping a function would streamline this--I have tried to create a function for this, but my efforts to date have turned up junk.

Thanks
Greg Blevins
The Market Solutions Group 




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