How do I remove column descriptions/labels? I exported survey data from Qualtrics directly into R using the package "qualtRics"

Question

Thank you! enter image description here

Answer 1

The labels are stored as attributes of the individual vectors in the tibble returned by qualtRics::fetch_survey(). You can modify the label for an individual column this way:

attr(tibble_name$column_name, "label") <- new_value_here

(If you want to remove the label entirely, you can set the new value to NULL.)

For removing multiple labels, I recommend the sjlabelled package. To remove all labels entirely:

tibble_name %>% 
  sjlabelled::remove_all_labels() %>% 
  tibble()    # without this, results will be cast as a list

To remove labels only from variables that meet certain tidyselect criteria:

tibble_name %>% 
  sjlabelled::remove_label(starts_with("Recipient")) %>% 
  tibble()

To modify labels or add new ones, sjlabelled also has add_labels(), replace_labels(), and set_labels() functions -- see the documentation.

Please note that, for Qualtrics datasets in particular, removing the labels destroys information -- someone with access only to the dataset and not to the original survey instrument may not be able to determine what the various columns represent without them. (The screenshot shows trivial examples where the labels are the same as the column names, but for the question response data it's different.)