st: Combining variables

[Matthew Anstey <drmatt.rtr@gmail.com>]

Good afternoon,

I have a single survey dataset that respondents answered questions about multiple patients (up to 4).

Thus for the 4 patients the respondents may have described, they  are recorded as 

AGE AGE2 AGE3 AGE4
DAYS DAYS2 DAYS3 DAYS4
and so on for the 10 characteristics. These are categorical variables (not continuous).


I want to create a summary variable for each characteristic, that will combine all the patients together into their categories.

For instance,

For instance : age has 4 possible categories (groupings 1, 2 , 3 ,4 ). I want to combine AGE grouping 1 with AGE2 grouping 1, with AGE3 grouping 1 with AGE4 grouping 1 and then AGE2 grouping 2  and so on.

I have been trying  -egen- without success.

thanks

Matt


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