How do you recode a column with an age range (18-29) to a random number in this age range using the sample function in R?

Question

We have the following issue: In our data set we have a column where age ranges of the peoples surveyed where given (e.g. 18-29). We want to create a new column which gives us for each person a random number within this age range. We have tried to combine the recode and sample function for this but it doesn't work. Could someone help us out? The data is from R package fivethirtyeight (steak_survey).

Our code:

library(fivethirtyeight)

#rand_age variable
steak_survey$rad <- recode(steak_survey$age , "'18-29' = sample(18:29, 1, replace = TRUE)")

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

If you don't mind using dplyr, something like this should do it if you just want this for the 18-29 age range:

library(dplyr)

steak_survey <- steak_survey %>% 
  mutate(rad = if_else(
    age == "18-29",
    sample(18:29, nrow(.), replace = TRUE),
    NA_integer_))

If you wanted this for all age ranges, then maybe case_when would be useful (I've assumed a maximum age of 80):

steak_survey <- steak_survey %>% 
  mutate(
    rad = case_when(
      age == "18-29" ~ sample(18:29, nrow(.), replace = TRUE),
      age == "30-44" ~ sample(30:44, nrow(.), replace = TRUE),
      age == "45-60" ~ sample(45:60, nrow(.), replace = TRUE),
      age == "> 60" ~ sample(60:80, nrow(.), replace = TRUE),
      TRUE ~ NA_integer_
    )
  )