Re: st: counting number of children in a household

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

Your approach involves a lot of unnecessary work -- 5 lines of code with two 
egen calls -- when it can be done more quickly from first principles:

bysort hhid: gen no_childr=sum(age<19)
by hhid: replace no_childr=no_childr[_N]

Michael Blasnik
michael.blasnik@verizon.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Zamira Simkins" <zs9814a@american.edu>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 7:01 PM
Subject: RE: st: counting number of children in a household


> Someone asked how to count how many children are in a given household and
> how to assign this number to each individual in the same household.
>
> What I usually do is:
>
> sort hhid
> egen no_kids=count(id) if age<19, by(hhid)
> /*this counts kids in every hh and places the sum in a row where an
> individual is <=18yo, rows with adults will have a missing value because
> they did not meet the if condition*/
> egen no_childr=max(no_kids), by(hhid)
> /*this assigns the total number of children to each individual within the
> same hh*/
> replace no_childr=0 if no_childr==.
> drop no_kids
> /*you do not need no_kids anymore, so drop it*/
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