Rebecca. You have a lot of options here depending on what you are really
trying to end up with. One very generic way of getting information from all
individuals in a household into each observation is to use reshape.
For example:
bys hhid: gen totmem = _N (gives you the total number of members in each
household)
reshape wide income education age ... , i(hhid) t(person) (this will give
you one record per households with everyone's info
expand totmem (you know have the correct number of individual observations)
bys hhid: gen person = _n (you now have a person number)
gen inc = .
qui su totmem, meanonly
forval i = 1/r(max){
replace income = income`i' if person==`i'
}
these steps recreate your individual data but keep all your 'wide' household
information as well.
A much simpler approach if you just want to record each person's income data
in each household record is:
qui su totmem, meanonly
forval i = 1/r(max){
gen inc_`i' = income if person==`i'
bys hhid (inc_`i'): replace inc_`i' = inc_`i' [_n-1] if inc_`i' [_n-1]~=.
};
Steve
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rebecca Kalmus [SMTP:[email protected]]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 10:30 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: st: copying the contents of a variable to another obervation
>
> Does anyone know a simple way to copy the contents of a variable for one
> observation over to a new variable in a different observation? For
> instance, suppose I have a data set consisting of married couples. I have
>
> three variables: a household identifier (hhid), a person identifier within
>
> the household (person) which equals one or two, and a variable for income
> (income). I want to create a new variable for spouse's income
> (inc_spouse). To do so I code the following:
>
> by hhid, sort: gen inc_spouse=income[2] if person==1;
> by hhid: replace inc_spouse=income[1] if person==2;
>
> This is a cumbersome process, which becomes more complicated for more
> complex data set--if, for instance, the households contain different
> numbers of people. In addition, with more complicated data, it becomes
> more difficult to check whether or not the coding is done correctly.
>
> Does anyone know a simple way of copying the contents of a variable for
> one observation over to a new variable in a different observation? It
> seems like something that would be done frequently enough that there
> should be some simple way of doing it. Any help is much appreciated.
>
> Rebecca
>
>
>
>
>
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> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
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