Counting based on partial strings in R

I’m working with some survey data collected from a google form. One of the questions allowed for respondents to provide multiple answers:

Data:

id_number <- c("101", "102", "103", "104", "105", "106")

why_join_program <- c("college assistance", 
                     "college assistance, fasfa support", 
                     "fasfa support, employment support", 
                     "college assistance, fasfa support, employment support", 
                     "college assistance, employment support",
                     "fasfa support")


df <- data.frame(id_number, why_join_program)

I have two questions:

1. I want to count how many responses include a single answer (i.e., how many respondents identified "college support"?

2. Can you provide a good way to organize this into a table? group_by and summarize() creates a table that counts every combination of responses. I want to create a table broken down by response and count the number of respondents who indicated that answer. This table would count respondents multiple times if they indicated multiple answers.

Thank you.

>Solution :

Using strsplit and table.

strsplit(df$why_join_program, ', ') |> unlist() |> table()
# college assistance employment support      fasfa support 
#                  4                  3                  4 

Note: R >= 4.1 used