Split text column into two parts

tidyverse
2

One way is to make it approachable via tidyr::separate(). This depends on you knowing all possible values for your factor variable.

library(tidyverse)

original_df <- tribble(
  ~variable, ~response,
  "JobFactorDiversity", "Important", 
  "JobFactorRemote", "Not Important", 
  "JobFactorDiversity", "Not Important", 
  "WorkChallengeFrequency", "Frequent", 
  "WorkChallengeDirtyData", "Rarely" 
)

prefixes <- c("JobFactor", "WorkChallenge")
prefixes <- paste(prefixes, collapse = "|")
prefixes <- paste0("(", prefixes, ")")

original_df %>%
  mutate(variable = sub(prefixes, "\\1|", variable)) %>% 
  separate(variable, into = c("factor", "aspect"))
#> # A tibble: 5 x 3
#>   factor        aspect    response     
#> * <chr>         <chr>     <chr>        
#> 1 JobFactor     Diversity Important    
#> 2 JobFactor     Remote    Not Important
#> 3 JobFactor     Diversity Not Important
#> 4 WorkChallenge Frequency Frequent     
#> 5 WorkChallenge DirtyData Rarely

Created on 2018-01-21 by the reprex package (v0.1.1.9000).