grattandata

Easily load microdata from the Grattan Institute data warehouse in R. Users will require access to the Grattan Institute data warehouse.

Get access to the data warehouse

Speak to a Grattan R user to get access to the data warehouse. Post in #r_at_grattan Slack if you’re not sure who to speak to.

Note that access to some parts (most) of the warehouse requires you to be an approved user of the relevant microdata.

Installation

You can install grattandata from Github as follows:

# If the `remotes` package is not installed, install it
if(!require(remotes)) {
  install.packages("remotes")
}

# Install `grattandata` from GitHub using remotes like this:
remotes::install_github("grattan/grattandata",
                        dependencies = TRUE, 
                        upgrade = "always", 
                        build_vignettes = TRUE)

Read microdata with read_microdata()

The core function of the package is read_microdata(). If you give read_microdata() a unique fragment of a filename - with or without the directory names - it will load the relevant file for you. Don’t worry about upper case and lower case letters - either, or a mix of both, will work.

Here are some working examples using the Victorian Government’s VISTA travel dataset:

vista_12_16_p <- read_microdata("P_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv")

vista_12_16_p  <- read_microdata("csv/P_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv")

vista_12_16_p  <- read_microdata("victoria/vista/2009/csv/P_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv")

If you give read_microdata() a filename fragment that matches multiple files, it will return an informative error message telling you which files match your fragment. For example:

vista <- read_microdata("VISTA12_16_")
#> Error in find_filename(filename): Multiple files were found with VISTA12_16_ in the filename. .
#>  The matches are:
#> victoria/vista/2012-2016/csv/2012_to_2016/H_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv
#> victoria/vista/2012-2016/csv/2012_to_2016/JTE_VISTA12_16_sa1_V1.csv
#> victoria/vista/2012-2016/csv/2012_to_2016/JTW_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv
#> victoria/vista/2012-2016/csv/2012_to_2016/P_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv
#> victoria/vista/2012-2016/csv/2012_to_2016/S_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv
#> victoria/vista/2012-2016/csv/2012_to_2016/T_VISTA12_16_SA1_V1.csv

You can now identify which file you want to load, and be more specific with the fragment that you pass to read_microdata().

Data stored elsewhere

Some data - like HILDA - can’t be stored on Dropbox with our other microdata. The function add_microdata_location() enables you to tell the {grattandata} package where to look for this off-warehouse microdata. You use it like this:

add_microdata_location(path = file.path("documents", "hilda"))

read_microdata("hilda_wave1.dta")
read_microdata("hilda_wave2.dta")

Package vignette

For more, see the package vignette by typing browseVignettes("grattandata"). This should open a tab in your web browser - click ‘HTML’.