R help - Mar 2010 - two questions for R beginners

For psychologists like me (possibly for others) by far the most
time-consuming detail is variable labels. I need them for just about
every analysis I do. We can use special packages like Hmisc and its
function spss.get to import the labels, but then nearly all the other
packages don't respect the labels, even simple things like list. So I
find myself either adding them back in at every step or making my own
versions of the functions. People coming from SPSS just expect the
output of basic functions like factanal to display the labels, or at
least to have the option of doing so.
Respecting/preserving variable labels in more core functions would be
an enormous help for social scientists IMHO.

What helped? Lots of things - r-seek and quick-R are my favourites,
along with amazing people who reply to problems on r-help.

On 03/26/2010 02:58 PM, Steve Powell wrote:
> For psychologists like me (possibly for others) by far the most
> time-consuming detail is variable labels. I need them for just about
> every analysis I do. We can use special packages like Hmisc and its
> function spss.get to import the labels, but then nearly all the other
> packages don't respect the labels, even simple things like list. So I
> find myself either adding them back in at every step or making my own
> versions of the functions. People coming from SPSS just expect the
> output of basic functions like factanal to display the labels, or at
> least to have the option of doing so.
> Respecting/preserving variable labels in more core functions would be
> an enormous help for social scientists IMHO.
>
Hi Steve,
 From another psychologist, this is one reason that I have been 
rewriting a number of functions to read and display the 
"variable.labels" attribute produced by the read.spss function in the 
foreign package.

Jim