Build a Harmonized Stacked Master QES Dataset

Downloads multiple Quebec Election Study datasets, harmonizes shared variables, stacks all rows into one master data frame, de-duplicates respondents within the same survey code, and drops rows that are empty across harmonized variables.

Usage

get_qes_master(
  surveys = NULL,
  assign_global = TRUE,
  object_name = "qes_master",
  quiet = FALSE,
  strict = FALSE,
  save_path = NULL
)

Arguments

surveys: Character vector of qesR survey codes. Defaults to all studies from get_qescodes().
assign_global: If TRUE, assign the result to .GlobalEnv using object_name.
object_name: Object name used when assign_global = TRUE. Defaults to "qes_master".
quiet: If TRUE, suppress informational output while downloading.
strict: If TRUE, stop when any study fails. If FALSE, return partial results and record failures in attributes.
save_path: Optional output path for writing the master file. Use .rds for RDS output; otherwise CSV is written. When opaque legacy variables are renamed in the merged output, an old-to-new variable map is also written alongside the saved file.

Value

A harmonized stacked data frame with attributes: source_map, loaded_surveys, failed_surveys, and harmonized_variables. Additional attributes duplicates_removed, empty_rows_removed, and variable_name_map report row filtering and renaming details. When save_path is provided, the output path is stored in saved_to; if renaming is applied, the sidecar mapping file path is stored in variable_name_map_path.