R: Assign variable labels of data frame columns

Question

I am struggling with variable labels of data.frame columns. Say I have the following data frame (part of much larger data frame):

data <- data.frame(age =         


        

Answer 1

I highly recommend to use the Hmisc::upData() function.

Here a reprex example:

set.seed(22)
data <- data.frame(age = floor(rnorm(6,25,10)), 
                   sex = gl(2,1,6, labels = c("f","m")))
var.labels <- c(age = "Age in Years", 
                sex = "Sex of the participant")
dplyr::as.tbl(data) # as tibble ---------------------------------------------
#> # A tibble: 6 × 2
#>     age    sex
#>    
#> 1    19      f
#> 2    49      m
#> 3    35      f
#> 4    27      m
#> 5    22      f
#> 6    43      m
data <- Hmisc::upData(data, labels = var.labels) # update data --------------
#> Input object size:    1328 bytes;     2 variables     6 observations
#> New object size: 2096 bytes; 2 variables 6 observations
Hmisc::label(data) # check new labels ---------------------------------------
#>                      age                      sex 
#>           "Age in Years" "Sex of the participant"
Hmisc::contents(data) # data dictionary -------------------------------------
#> 
#> Data frame:data  6 observations and 2 variables    Maximum # NAs:0
#> 
#> 
#>                     Labels Levels   Class Storage
#> age           Age in Years        integer integer
#> sex Sex of the participant      2         integer
#> 
#> +--------+------+
#> |Variable|Levels|
#> +--------+------+
#> |   sex  |  f,m |
#> +--------+------+