Opening Surveymonkey files in R

Many people use Surveymonkey to conduct online surveys. You can get standard pdf reports of your data, but often you’ll want to do some more analysis or have more control over the design of the charts. An obvious option is to read the data into R. But there’s a practical problem: Surveymonkey uses the second row of it’s output file for answer categories and puts some other information in that row as well. This has the additional effect that R will treat numerical variables as factors.

I wrote a few lines of code which, I think, deal with that problem and turned that into an R package. Until recently it’d never have occured to me to create an R package, but then I read this post by Hillary Parker who describes the process so clearly that it actually appeared doable. I took some additional cues from this video by trestletech. The steps are described here.

I thought of adding a function to read data from Limesurvey, an open source alternative to Surveymonkey. But apparently, that functionality is already available (I haven’t tested it).

The package is available on Github.