R: creating a likert scale barplot

Question

I'm new to R and feeling a bit lost ... I'm working on a dataset which contains 7 point-likert-scale answers.

My data looks like this for example:

My goal is to create a barplot which displays the likert scale on the x-lab and frequency on y-lab.

What I understood so far is that I first have to transform my data into a frequency table. For this I used a code that I found in another post on this site:

    data <- factor(data, levels = c(1:7))
    table(data)

However I always get this output:

    data
    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
    0 0 0 0 0 0 0 

Any ideas what went wrong or other ideas how I could realize my plan?

Thanks a lot! Lorena

Answer 1

This is a very simple way of handling your question, only using base-R

## your data
my_obs <- c(4,5,3,4,5,5,3,3,3,6)

## use a factor for class data
## you could consider making it ordered (ordinal data)
## which makes sense for Likert data
## type "?factor" in the console to see the documentation
my_factor <- factor(my_obs, levels = 1:7)

## calculate the frequencies
my_table <- table(my_factor)

## print my_table
my_table
 # my_factor
 # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
 # 0 0 4 2 3 1 0 

## plot
barplot(my_table)

yielding the following simple barplot:

Please, let me know whether this is what you want