st: Coding overlap events in sequence data

["Cheng, Hsu-Chih" <simon.cheng@uconn.edu>]

Dear All: 
 
I am coding sequence data for 5013 respondents’ sexual relationship histories.  For each respondent, I have 16 time positions (ages 18~18.25 [sext1], 18.25~18.50 [sext2],…, 21.75~22 [sext16]) and the respondent’s beginning and end ages of up to 48 relationships (most respondents have fewer than 5 relationships; so the beginning and end ages of the other 40+ relationships have missing values). Right now, respondents with multiple relationships in a given time position are coded as 4 (so, for example, sext5 = 4).  I can manually go through all respondents to determine whether the multiple relationships in a given time overlap or not and recode them into different categories, but this is very tedious and time consuming.  Is there a faster way to do this?
 
Here are four examples with multiple relationships in Time 2 (ages 18.25~18.50).  sexBag1 and sexEag1 indicate the beginning and end ages of relationship 1; sexBag2 and sexEag2 indicate the beginning and end ages of relationship 1;…, and so on.  I want to recode [sext2] for Cases 1 and 2 as 1 to indicate that their relationships in Time 2 do not overlap, and Cases 3 and 4 as 2 to indicate their relationships in Time 2 overlap.
 
id  sext2   sexBag1  sexEag1  sexBag2  sexEag2  sexBag3 sexEag3  sexBag4  sexEag4  sexBag5    sexEag5
1       4      18.5    18.75   18.333   18.416   21.416    21.5    19.25   24.083        .          . 
2       4         .        .   18.250   18.333   18.416  21.666   21.583   22.833     22.5   22.50004  
3       4    17.249   18.999   18.499   21.999   22.166  23.249   (missing values after this)
4       4    16.750   22.750   18.416   18.666   (missing values after this)
 
I really appreciate if anyone can give me some suggestions. I can provide more information about the data if needed. Thanks again.
 
Best,
 
Simon
 
 
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