Reordering groups in Likert plots with R

Question

I\'m using the jbryer/likert package to plot Likert data.

Consider the response table, called items—here, A, B, and so on are

Answer 1

You can do this using the group.order parameter to specify the order. Use the names() function to obtain the names of the columns.

plot(likert_var, group.order=names(results)) 

Answer 2

I decided to re-implement this myself, as jon suggested:

# additional requirements
library(ggplot2)
library(reshape2)
library(RColorBrewer)

# create summary table
table_summary = likert(items)

# reshape results
results = melt(table_summary$results, id.vars='Item')

# reorder results
results$Item = factor(results$Item, levels=c("LT", "ST", "SemTag", "SemTagContext"))

# some defaults
ymin = 0
text.size = 3

ggplot(results, aes(y=value, x=Item, group=Item)) + 
  geom_bar(stat='identity', aes(fill=variable)) + 
  ylim(c(-5,105)) + 
  coord_flip() +
  scale_fill_manual('Response', values=brewer.pal(7, "RdYlGn"), 
              breaks=levels(results$variable), 
              labels=levels(results$variable)) +
  geom_text(data=table_summary$summary, y=ymin, aes(x=Item, 
              label=paste(round(low), '%', sep='')), 
              size=text.size, hjust=1) +
  geom_text(data=table_summary$summary, y=100, aes(x=Item,
              label=paste(round(high), '%', sep='')), 
              size=text.size, hjust=-.2) +
  ylab('Percentage') + xlab('')

This produces the correct order:

Answer 3

I added a pull request to Jason Bryer's package that adds fullname attributes to the columns, which are then used when you plot. Detailed writeup here http://reganmian.net/blog/2013/10/02/likert-graphs-in-r-embedding-metadata-for-easier-plotting/

Given that addition, you can do

db <- likert_add_fullnames(db, c(
  "X7"="Do you use sites like Facebook, Twitter, or GPlus?",
  "X8"="Do you participate in online communities organised around your interests? 
    (could be juggling, cooking, sports or academics, for example)?",
  "X10"="Do you know of online communities relevant to your discipline or the 
    courses you are taking now?"))
...

and then these names will be reflected when you plot.