Re: st: counting number of children in a household

[David Bell <dcbell9@yahoo.com>]

There are advantages to brevity.  On the other hand, there are also  
advantages to clarity.  When I was a programmer (self employed), I  
preferred Michael's brief approach.  However, now that I work with  
research teams including students, I have found that Zamira's more  
verbose approach has its own distinct advantages.  The logic, because  
it is broken down into smaller steps, is accessible to more members  
of the team and not just to the sophisticated.

Furthermore, for my own work, although I do use -gen-, for most  
commands and options I prefer to minimize abbreviation.  So when I  
have to redo an analysis some months later, I find it easier to  
understand what I did the first time.

Dave Bell

On Feb 28, 2006, at 6:21 PM, Michael Blasnik wrote:


> 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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