How to group factor levels in R

[WWhipple]

I'm undertaking a data analysis of the 2017 General Election using the BES Survey. I need to test whether people who identify as religious are more likely to vote for a certain party, but the survey question lists each religion seperately?

How do I combine these answers together to have one label for all religions?

So far I have the following which gives me a breakdown of each party, voting for Conservative and Other but I need it to be only two categories, 'No Religion' and 'All Religions'.

bes17f <- read_spss("bes_f2f_2017_v1.5.sav")
bes17f <- as_factor(bes17f) %>% droplevels()
descriptives(bes17f, vars=c(b02, y06), freq = TRUE, bar = TRUE)
bes17f <- bes17f %>%
  mutate(
    vote17 = recode(b02, 
                    "Don`t know"=NA_character_,
                    "Don't know"=NA_character_,
                    "Refused"=NA_character_,
                    "Not stated" = NA_character_,
                    "Other" = NA_character_,
                    "NA" = NA_character_,
    ),
    Religion17 = recode(y06, 
                       "Don`t know"=NA_character_,
                       "Don't know"=NA_character_,
                       "No religion"=NA_character_,
                       "Refusal" = NA_character_,
    )
  )


bes17f <- bes17f %>%
mutate(vote17_simple = fct_other(vote17, keep=c("Conservatives")))
bes17f %>%
  drop_na(Religion17) %>%
  drop_na(vote17_simple) %>%
  ggplot(aes(x=Religion17)) +
  geom_bar(position="fill", aes(fill=vote17_simple)) +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 20, hjust = 1)) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent)

Thanks in advance!

[phiggins]

I think you want mutate(case_when from dplyr, as in this link
case_when

A good example is

starwars %>%
select(name:mass, gender, species) %>% 
mutate( type = case_when( 
     height > 200 | mass > 200 ~ "large", 
     species == "Droid" ~ "robot", 
     TRUE ~ "other" ) )

in your use case, it would be something like:

bes17f %>%
  mutate(case_when(
  vote17 %in% c("Religion1", "Religion2", "Religion3") ~ "All Religions",
  TRUE ~ "No Religion"))

[nwerth]

I've formatted your code to make it easier for others to read. Hope you don't mind.

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[dromano]

Hi: Since we don't have access to your table (or the command descriptives() in my case), it's hard to know what specific suggestion to make. Could you provide a small 'toy' example table that mimics the problem you're trying to solve? Or maybe provide a url to the data and the name of package that contains the command descriptives()?