README.Rmd

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# pew_leadr 

Motivated by a [Pew Research Center tweet](https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1310060605752119303?s=20), displaying recent data on countries viewed as the world’s current leading economic power, I became curious how these estimates compared to previous administrations of the question.

Using the Pew Research Center [Question Search interface](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/question-search/), I found pertinent data available on the website that provided estimates from the spring 2016 and spring 2019 surveys. My objective was to calculate the 2016 to 2019 change in these estimates in order to provide some longitudinal context for interpreting the estimates presented in the aforementioned tweet.

The source data for this analysis come from the Pew Global Attitudes & Trends Question Database; Question: [Today, which ONE of the following do you think is the world's leading economic power?](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/question-search/?qid=1284&cntIDs=&stdIDs=).  

A .csv file of the exported table of data can be found at [data-raw/pew_leading_economic_power_data.csv](https://github.com/MarkLaVenia/pew_leadr/blob/master/data-raw/pew_leading_economic_power_data.csv)

All `R` code required for this analysis can be found in [R/pew_leadr.Rmd](https://github.com/MarkLaVenia/pew_leadr/blob/master/R/pew_leadr.Rmd). 

Analyses made use of the `tidyverse` and `zoo` `R` packages. Steps to this project were to clean and restructure the file to prepare it for analysis; calculate summary statistics for 2016 to 2019 change in response by country; and identify countries that demonstrated the largest increase or decrease over the 2016-2019 period.

## acknowledgement 

I want to thank The Pew Research Center for making these data freely available and thank their communications teams for their role in disseminating these results and promoting public discourse on the findings.