Reordering variables in a plot

Question

Does anyone know an easy way to reorder the variables in the picture to whatever order I want? I'd like to have Q1 as the highest bar and Q4 as the lowest bar.

  select(c("Unit_number",
           contains('Q'))) %>%
  filter(Unit_number == 6) %>%
  pivot_longer(names_to = "question",
               values_to = "answer",
               cols = -Unit_number) %>%
  group_by(question) %>%
  summarise( 
    n=n(),
    mean=mean(answer),
    sd=sd(answer)
  )


ggplot(Mydata_tidy, aes(x=question, y=mean)) +
  geom_bar(stat ="identity") +
  geom_errorbar(aes(ymin = mean-sd, ymax = mean+sd)) +
  coord_flip()```

Here's the data frame ↓
structure(list(question = c("Q1", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4"), n = c(8L, 
8L, 8L, 8L), mean = c(5.5, 4.375, 4.75, 5.25), sd = c(1.0690449676497, 
1.30247018062932, 1.16496474502144, 1.03509833901353)), row.names = c(NA, 
4L), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

Answer 1

We can convert the column to factor with levels arranged in that custom order

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
Mydata_tidy %>% 
   mutate(question = factor(question, levels = paste0("Q", 4:1))) %>% 
   ggplot(aes(x=question, y=mean)) + geom_bar(stat ="identity") +
   geom_errorbar(aes(ymin = mean-sd, ymax = mean+sd)) +
   coord_flip()

-output