Re: st: looping

[n j cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

You should read some basic accounts of -by:-.

Also, please note the advice in the Statalist FAQ:

"Statalist is an international list. Please explain details that may 
make sense only in your own corner of the world."

Some of the details here presuppose knowledge of your local
situation, which I guess to be the United States. It is likely that many 
members of Statalist do not know what "msa" means, for example.

I am still in the dark on what an observation in your dataset
looks like, or what it represents. I assume that -males- and -females- 
are numeric variables, but are they dummies or do they include
counts? In either case, what is -perwt- precisely?

Either way, I guess that -egen, total()- with heavy use of -by()-
or -by:- is the easiest way to get totals of males and females,
after which you get ratios directly. It should take about 3 lines
of Stata. The only looping would be that tacit in -egen-.

Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk

>>> Scott Cunningham

I have the following dataset:

perwt year state msa county males females age race

My goal is to create sex ratios (ie ratios of males to females) for
each county.  I have not attempted this before because the way that I
calculated sex ratios for states and cities (ie, msa) was to write
a .do file that summed up the person weights (ie, perwt) for each
state/msa.  This was not so bad for states, but moreso for cities,
since there are 350 cities.  The number of counties are in the
thousands, and since I have to create sex ratios that differ by race,
age and year, it would require writing out a very long .do file.  So
my question is:  is there a looping procedure I could use, which
would use the county-level variable as the variable that does the
operation?  For instance, if there were two counties (1 and 2), then
the loop would sum all males of the given age-race criteria, all
females of the same age-race criteria, take the ratio and record that
for county 1, then repeat for county 2, etc.

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