Data collected in Qualtrics come in a funny way when exported to CSV: the first two lines are headers. Simply using read.csv() will mess things up, because typically we only have one line as header. We can skip empty lines at the beginning, but there is no immediately obvious way to skip only the second line.
Of course there is an R package for that, but when I tried, the qualtRics package was very slow:
devtools::install_github("ropensci/qualtRics")
library(qualtRics)
raw_data <- readSurvey("qualtrics_survey.csv")
library(qualtRics)
raw_data <- readSurvey("qualtrics_survey_legacy.csv", legacyFormat=T) # if two rows at the top
As an alternative, you could import just the header of your survey, and then join it to an import where you skip the header lines. Actually, here’s a better way of doing just this:
everything = readLines("qualtrics_survey_legacy.csv")
wanted = everything[-2]
mydata = read.csv(textConnection(wanted), header = TRUE, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
If you get an error “EOF within quoted string”, don’t ignore it: It indicates problems with double quoting, so add quote = "" to your import code.
If you are willing to violate the principle of not touching the raw data file, you could open the survey in a spreadsheet like Excel or LibreOffice Calc and delete the unwanted rows.
Given all these options, I found the most reliable way (as in: contrary to the above, it hasn’t failed me so far) to get Qualtrics data into R yet another one:
1. export as SPSS (rather than CSV)
2. use library(haven)
3. read_spss()
Didier Ruedin 