R Experts,

I have a dataframe made up of character vectors--these are results from survey questions. I need to convert them to factors.

I tried the following which did not work:
scs2<-sapply(scs2,as.factor)
also this didn't work:
scs2<-sapply(scs2,function(x) as.factor(x))

After doing either of above I end up with
>str(scs2)

chr [1:10, 1:10] "very important" "very important" "very important" "very important" ...

 - attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2

  ..$ : NULL

  ..$ : chr [1:10] "Q1_1" "Q1_2" "Q1_3" "Q1_4" ...

>class(scs2)
"matrix"

But when I do it one at a time it works:
scs2$Q1_1<-as.factor(scs2$Q1_1)
scs2$Q1_2<- as.factor(scs2$Q1_2)

What am I doing wrong?  How do I accomplish this with sapply or similar function?

Data for reproducibility:


scs2<-structure(list(Q1_1 = c("very important", "very important", "very important",

"very important", "very important", "very important", "very important",

"somewhat important", "important", "very important"), Q1_2 = c("important",

"somewhat important", "very important", "important", "important",

"very important", "somewhat important", "somewhat important",

"very important", "very important"), Q1_3 = c("very important",

"important", "very important", "very important", "important",

"very important", "very important", "somewhat important", "not important",

"important"), Q1_4 = c("very important", "important", "very important",

"very important", "important", "important", "important", "very important",

"somewhat important", "important"), Q1_5 = c("very important",

"not important", "important", "very important", "not important",

"important", "somewhat important", "important", "somewhat important",

"not important"), Q1_6 = c("very important", "not important",

"important", "very important", "somewhat important", "very important",

"very important", "very important", "important", "important"),

    Q1_7 = c("very important", "somewhat important", "important",

    "somewhat important", "important", "important", "very important",

    "very important", "somewhat important", "not important"),

    Q2 = c("Somewhat", "Very Much", "Somewhat", "Very Much",

    "Very Much", "Very Much", "Very Much", "Very Much", "Very Much",

    "Very Much"), Q3 = c("yes", "yes", "yes", "yes", "yes", "yes",

    "yes", "yes", "yes", "yes"), Q4 = c("None", "None", "None",

    "None", "Confirmed Field of Study", "Confirmed Field of Study",

    "Confirmed Field of Study", "None", "None", "None")), .Names = c("Q1_1",

"Q1_2", "Q1_3", "Q1_4", "Q1_5", "Q1_6", "Q1_7", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4"

), row.names = c(78L, 46L, 80L, 196L, 188L, 197L, 39L, 195L,

172L, 110L), class = "data.frame")


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