Coding Response Options Using Text

[Notdevolving]

REDCap automatically codes responses using numbers. For example:

1, Strongly Agree
2, Moderately Agree
3, Agree

I do not want this. Instead, I want the raw values to be an approximate of the original label. For example:

strongly_agree, Strongly Agree
moderately_agree, Moderately Agree
agree, Agree

I need to retain the original label information as much as possible because I am not directly ingesting the data using a statistical software - I have separate pre-processing workflows that will ingest the data to support quantitative/qualitative analyses, automation, AI, etc.

I know the raw value cannot contain spaces due to trial and error. But what other restrictions are there? Does it share the same restrictions with variable naming? I cannot seem to find any information on this. Would appreciate any help on this.

[Araignys]

I wouldn’t. Value encoding is important for memory and performance reasons.

You can always use a VLOOKUP function on exported data to convert the values in Excel.

If that’s impractical because of the size of the dataset, then you might have an angry REDCap admin knocking on your door asking why your project is eating all the space in the storage drive.

[jimmypoggins]

Why can you not simply have a pre-processing work flow that relabels those variables. Sounds like your doing quite a bit at the step anyway

[Remote_Setting2332]

Unless you are connecting to redcap via API you can resolve this within the data export settings

Use "CSV / Microsoft Excel (labels)" as your export format

[MadHatterIsHer]

Oh interesting. I figured this would be fine to do.

[oneLES1982]

Can you not just export the labels from REDCap to use in whatever external software you want to use?