The goal of psidread is to provide a user-friendly approach to streamline the management, creation, and formatting of panel data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

Jan 16th Update: This package is now available on CRAN! You can install it directly from CRAN with:

install.packages("psidread")

Or, you can install the development version of psidread from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("Qcrates/psidread")

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is the longest running longitudinal household survey in the world, which provides invaluable data covering numerous topics including marriage, income, wealth, health and etc. However, the process of converting raw PSID data files into datasets ready for analysis is quite complex and challenging, especially for new users.

This package is developed with the purpose of addressing these challenges within only R environment without additional assistance from other statistical programming softwares. By bridging these gaps, the package aims to make PSID datasets more usable and manageable for researchers and analysts.

What psidread package is created to help:

• Create a table of data structure across multiple waves using the text that can be copied and pasted from the website

• Unzip and convert the zipped files without additional help of other software

• Read and merge the data files from multiple waves

• Rename and reshape the dataset to fit the need for advanced analysis

# Step 1: Create the table of data structure ----
psid_varlist = c(" hh_age || [13]ER53017 [17]ER66017", " p_age || [13]ER34204")
str_df <- psid_str(varlist = psid_varlist, type = "separated")

# Step 2: Unzip and convert the ascii data ----
input_directory <- "your/input/directory"
output_directory <- "your/export/directory"
psid_unzip(indir = input_directory,
           exdir = output_directory,
           zipped = TRUE,
           type = "package",
           filename = NA)

# Step 3: Read and merge data ----
data_directory <- "your/folder/with/converted/data"
psid_df <- psid_read(indir = data_directory, str_df = str_df,idvars = c("ER30000"),type = "package",filename = NA)

# Step 4: Rename and reshape the data ----
df <- psid_reshape(psid_df = psid_df, str_df = str_df, shape = "long", level = "individual")
df

Please refer to the vignettes for the detailed instructions on how to build your own dataset from PSID using this package.