"Annelies Vos" <[email protected]> writes:
> recoding might work (you may have noticed that I'm not a stata expert),
> but like Nick Cox mentioned, it's important to me that I can easily look
> up what I did months later, and for that I don't think recoding is very
> clear.
> But, what would happen if i would use recode, and some of the old country
> specific codes are the same as the new origin (country group)codes? (this
> is, in fact, the case).
>
> example (fake):
> natio 1 = south africa
> natio 2 = somalia
> natio 3 = argentina
> natio 4 = russia
> natio 5 = slovenia
> natio 6 = the netherlands
> -gen origin = natio
> -recode origin 1 2=4 3=3 4 5=2 6=1
> now I should have:
> origin 1 (netherlands) includes natio 6(netherlands)
> origin 2 (eastern europe) includes natio 4, 5 (russia, slovenia)
> origin 3 (latin america) includes natio 3 (argentina)
> origin 4 (africa) includes natio 1, 2 (south africa, somalia)
>
> but I think I would have:
> origin 1 does not exist, it's overwritten because it first became 4, but
> then 4 was recoded in 2, so that now origin 2 (eastern europe) includes
> not only natio 4 and 5, but also natio 1 and 2 (africa)...
> etc.
>
> of course it's easy to check this out in a little fake dataset. But the
> point I'd like to make is that if this is true, recode is not suitable for
> data that are not coded in the same sequence as you want to group them in
Well, it might have been quicker for you to actually check this in a
fake dataset than write that whole email! As you can see (below),
recode does not do the re-recoding you worried about, but does exactly
what (I think) you wanted:
. input natio
natio
1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. 6
7. end
. gen origin=natio
. recode origin 1 2=4 3=3 4 5=2 6=1
(origin: 5 changes made)
. l
+----------------+
| natio origin |
|----------------|
1. | 1 4 |
2. | 2 4 |
3. | 3 3 |
4. | 4 2 |
5. | 5 2 |
|----------------|
6. | 6 1 |
+----------------+
Chris.
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