Introduction to labelled

Joseph Larmarange

The purpose of the labelled package is to provide functions to manipulate metadata as variable labels, value labels and defined missing values using the haven_labelled and haven_labelled_spss classes introduced in haven package.

These classes allow to add metadata (variable, value labels and SPSS-style missing values) to vectors.

It should be noted that value labels doesn’t imply that your vectors should be considered as categorical or continuous. Therefore, value labels are not intended to be use for data analysis. For example, before performing modeling, you should convert vectors with value labels into factors or into classic numeric/character vectors.

Therefore, two main approaches could be considered.