Dear stata list servers,
Could I ask you for help on a creative solution to the following task, that I seem to find a little unusual (maybe there is an obvious answer to this?)
Suppose each household consists of a male and a female, and I have data on the time they record doing a certain task.
The data looks like this:
Start task, Male Finish task, Male Start task, Female Finish task, Female
household 1 5am 3pm 5pm 10pm
household 2 7am 2pm 8am 4pm
household 3 8am 5pm 9pm 4am
I want to sort, within each household, all numbers in ascending order (time increasing as we move to the right), so that the data looks like this:
Start task, Male
household 1 5am 3pm 5pm 10pm
household 2 7am 8am 2pm 4pm
household 3 8am 5pm 9pm 4am
...And then substitute each time by who it refers to (the male starting or finishing, or the female, so that it looks like this:
Household id Timing pattern
household 1: MMFF
household 2: MFMF
household 3: MMFF
How would I do that?
Thanks so much for any help you can provide!
Irina
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
