How to set the order and value of factors in R using factor and fct_reorder (CC148)

September 23, 2021 • PD Schloss • 1 min read • •

Ever wonder how to set the order of categorical variables in a figure generated in R? Factors! Changing the order of categorical values can be useful in figures when the data are ordinal or when you want to order the values by another variable. Pat will use the base R factor function and the forcats fct_reorder function. The data depict the percentage of people in 15 countries who would be willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as of August and October of 2020.

Pat uses factor and the fct_reorder function from the forcats package as well as functions from the ggplot2, dplyr, showtext, ggtext and glue packages in RStudio

Code

You can browse the state of the repository at the

• beginning of the episode
• end of the episode

Data

The august_october_2020.csv data is available in the GitHub repository.

X.1,Total Agree - August 2020,Total Agree - October 2020
Total,77,73
India,87,87
China,97,85
South Korea,84,83
Brazil,88,81
Australia,88,79
United Kingdom,85,79
Mexico,75,78
Canada,76,76
Germany,67,69
Japan,75,69
South Africa,64,68
Italy,67,65
Spain,72,64
United States,67,64
France,59,54