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Download VIGITEL microdata

Source: R/vigitel.R
vigitel_data.Rd

Downloads and returns VIGITEL survey microdata from the Ministry of Health. Data is cached locally to avoid repeated downloads. When the arrow package is installed, data is cached in partitioned parquet format for faster subsequent reads.

Usage

vigitel_data(
  year = NULL,
  format = c("dta", "csv"),
  vars = NULL,
  cache_dir = NULL,
  force = FALSE,
  lazy = FALSE,
  backend = c("arrow", "duckdb")
)

Arguments

year

Integer or vector of integers. Years to return (2006-2024). Use NULL to return all years. Default is NULL.

format

Character. File format to download: "dta" (Stata, default) or "csv". Stata format preserves variable labels.

vars

Character vector. Variables to select. Use NULL for all variables. Default is NULL.

cache_dir

Character. Directory for caching downloaded files. Default uses tools::R_user_dir("healthbR", "cache").

force

Logical. If TRUE, re-download even if file exists in cache. Default is FALSE.

lazy

Logical. If TRUE, returns a lazy query object instead of a tibble. Requires the arrow package. The lazy object supports dplyr verbs (filter, select, mutate, etc.) which are pushed down to the query engine before collecting into memory. Call dplyr::collect() to materialize the result. Default: FALSE.

backend

Character. Backend for lazy evaluation: "arrow" (default) or "duckdb". Only used when lazy = TRUE. DuckDB backend requires the duckdb package.

Value

A tibble with VIGITEL microdata.

Details

The VIGITEL survey (Vigilância de Fatores de Risco e Proteção para Doenças Crônicas por Inquérito Telefônico) is conducted annually by the Brazilian Ministry of Health in all state capitals and the Federal District.

Data includes information on:

  • Demographics (age, sex, education, race)

  • Health behaviors (smoking, alcohol, diet, physical activity)

  • Health conditions (hypertension, diabetes, obesity)

  • Healthcare utilization

The survey uses post-stratification weights (variable pesorake) to produce population estimates. Always use these weights for statistical inference.

Performance

When the arrow package is installed, data is cached in partitioned parquet format. This allows the function to read only the requested years without loading the entire dataset into memory. If you frequently work with VIGITEL data, installing arrow is highly recommended:

install.packages("arrow")

Data source

Data is downloaded from the Ministry of Health website: https://svs.aids.gov.br/daent/cgdnt/vigitel/

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive()
# download all years (uses tempdir to avoid leaving files)
df <- vigitel_data(cache_dir = tempdir())

# download specific year
df_2024 <- vigitel_data(year = 2024, cache_dir = tempdir())

# download multiple years
df_recent <- vigitel_data(year = 2020:2024, cache_dir = tempdir())

# select specific variables
df_subset <- vigitel_data(
  year = 2024,
  vars = c("ano", "cidade", "sexo", "idade", "pesorake"),
  cache_dir = tempdir()
)
}