Aggregate variables and remember which variables this were

The resulting variables will have the attribute scale_item_names containing the basis for aggregation. Its label attribute will refer to the common stem of the aggregated variable names (if any), the number of variables, and the aggregation function.

aggregate_and_document_scale(items, fun = rowMeans, stem = NULL)

Arguments

items	data.frame of the items that should be aggregated
fun	aggregation function, defaults to rowMeans with na.rm = FALSE
stem	common stem for the variables, specify if it should not be auto-detected as the longest common stem of the variable names

Examples

testdf <- data.frame(bfi_neuro_1 = rnorm(20), bfi_neuro_2 = rnorm(20),
                    bfi_neuro_3R = rnorm(20), age = rpois(20, 30))
item_names <- c('bfi_neuro_1', 'bfi_neuro_2', 'bfi_neuro_3R')
testdf$bfi_neuro <- aggregate_and_document_scale(testdf[, item_names])
testdf$bfi_neuro
#>  [1] -0.287284749 -0.006951671 -1.263924018  0.160240530  0.984951589
#>  [6]  1.268794692 -0.903711211  0.104811152 -0.317597895 -1.235608530
#> [11]  0.414583429  0.187411304  0.700874388  0.003912358  0.218008596
#> [16] -0.482393654 -1.568738280  0.783572677 -0.043890297  0.122196267
#> attr(,"scale_item_names")
#> [1] "bfi_neuro_1"  "bfi_neuro_2"  "bfi_neuro_3R"
#> attr(,"label")
#> [1] "3 bfi_neuro items aggregated by rowMeans"