I regularly need to find a specific case or set of cases that meet some criteria when analyzing data, often so I can modify those values for one reason or another. The easiest way I have found to find such values in R is the “which” function.
As with most of my R examples, I’m going to use the 2010 wave of the General Social Survey (R version here) to illustrate. You can open that file in R and follow along.
In the 2010 GSS there is a variable for race (RACE). The options are: 1 = WHITE, 2 = BLACK, 3 = OTHER. To find all of the cases with a “3” in the dataset, I would use the following code:
which(GSS2010$RACE == "3", arr.ind = TRUE)Here’s what the command is doing…
“which” is the function that tells R to search for information that meets the criteria detailed in the parentheses.
GSS2010 is the name of the dataset.
RACE is the name of the variable in the dataset. By including the name of the variable, we restrict R to searching just inside that variable rather than the whole dataset. (The $ tells R that RACE is a variable inside the GSS2010 dataset.
The “==” indicates “equals” in R.
The target value, which can be text, characters, or numbers, goes inside the quotes. In this case, we wanted to find all of the cases with the number “3” which is code for “OTHER.”
arr.ind = TRUE tells R to include the index if the result is an array.
In the 2010 GSS, if you type in the code above, you’ll get a list like this:
[1] 1 12 14 19 27 28 42 44 46 50 64 73 96 97 101 102 119 120 121 123 124 130 133 140 145 147 151 152
[29] 153 154 159 161 180 185 190 194 195 199 211 213 217 220 230 245 263 275 278 287 288 295 297 301 305 312 314 318
[57] 333 339 345 348 349 371 373 381 403 420 441 446 458 464 465 473 475 477 478 479 483 489 495 501 505 507 508 520
[85] 550 554 561 564 567 591 593 631 704 712 713 715 716 732 741 749 770 776 792 793 805 807 823 824 829 877 901 956
[113] 973 1092 1112 1125 1186 1193 1218 1224 1264 1281 1291 1304 1307 1331 1336 1342 1345 1347 1352 1355 1356 1364 1365 1411 1423 1440 1441 1442
[141] 1444 1445 1446 1449 1451 1513 1523 1526 1528 1532 1534 1547 1550 1552 1556 1557 1559 1562 1564 1567 1568 1569 1570 1571 1572 1573 1574 1575
[169] 1576 1656 1660 1735 1764 1913 1933 1935 1993 2010 2011 2018 2019 2022 2038The [1] is indicating that this is the first response. The [29] indicates that the next number is the 29th response. The numbers after the brackets (“[ ]”) indicate the row where that response was found. Thus, I know that the 161st row in my dataset has the value 3 in the variable RACE.
We can check this by using the following code:
GSS2010[161,"RACE"]The result should be:
[1] 3BONUS:
Should you want to modify the value for an individual observation, like the one we just examined, you could use the following code:
GSS2010[161,"RACE"] <- 2This would change the values for that case from “3” (OTHER) to “2” (BLACK). I’m not really sure why you would want to do this in this instance, but, now you can. (There is a scenario when you might, but there are better ways to recode data.) Basically, the “<-” tells R to set the value of that specific observation to 2, overwriting the 3 that was there.
And if you wanted to change all of the values from 3 to 2, since you have a massive list, the easiest way would be to save all those values as a list, then have R change all the values in one fell swoop, like this:
OTHERRACELIST <- which(GSS2010$RACE == "3", arr.ind = TRUE)
GSS2010[c(OTHERRACELIST), "RACE"] <- 2The above two commands would create a list in your environment called “OTHERRACELIST” that includes all of the row numbers of the cases with a 3. The second command then tells R to look inside the GSS2010 dataset and use the list (c(OTHERRACELIST)) to find all the rows you want changed in the RACE variable to “2.” That will then change the code for all of the people coded as “3” into a “2.”
A script file with the above commands is available here.
NOTE: This was done in R version 3.5.2.
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