dplyr and tidyverse are convenient frameworks for data management and technical analytic programming. With more than 25 years of R experience, I have a tendency to analyze programmatic problems before I turn to packaged solutions.
Look-up tables in SQL are used to map character values with integer values stored in the databases, a similar concept relates to value labels in SPSS and R.
labels<-c("label1","label2","label3") vec<-c(1,1,1,0,2,1,0,2,2,2)
lvec<-labels[vec]
lvec
[1] "label1" "label1" "label1" "label2" "label1" "label2" "label2" "label2"