matching-ids

R code for generating unique identifiers for use in survey research. The code can be found in the file generating-ids.R.

The code is associated with the following publication:

Vogel, D. (2018). Matching survey responses with anonymity in environments with privacy concerns: A practical guide. International Journal of Public Sector Management, 31(7): 742–754. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-12-2017-0330. Open Access Post-Print: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/nwjd7

How to use

1. If not already done: install the packages random and writexl by typing install.packages("random", dep = TRUE) and install.packages("writexl", dep = TRUE)
2. Download the file generating-ids.R or copy the content of the file
3. Modify the number of identifiers you need in line 18 (amount <- 200). Notice, that you cannot generate more than 10,000 IDs.
4. Modify the length of the identifiers in line 19 (length <- 4).
5. Run the code. It generates approx. the amount of required identifiers, deletes identifiers with characters with a high likelihood of confusion, and asks for a location to store the file with the identifiers.

Packages

The script uses random (Eddelbuettel, 2017) to generate the identifiers and writexl (Ooms, 2017) to save the results in an Excel file.

Reproducibility

There is a Code Ocean Capsule of the code that ensures computational reproducibility: https://codeocean.com/capsule/9795597

References

Eddelbuettel, D. (2017). random: True Random Numbers using RANDOM.ORG. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=random

Ooms, J. (2017). writexl: Export Data Frames to ’xlsx’ Format. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=writexl