st: re: household and person identifiers

[Christopher Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

<>
Johanna wondered

I am working with a dataset where two identifier numbers uniquely identify
an individual. How do I create one identifier from the household and person
identifiers in STATA?


Martin suggested egen,group() but this would seem to be not very handy, as the resulting ID will be an arbitrary integer. When I had to do something like this with directorID (a number) and case code, I did

g dircase = string(directorID)+string(casenr)

That has the advantage of retaining both variables' contents in readable form, and making it string avoids any overflow problems. Naturally you could put in a separator such as +"_"+ in the expression if you wish.

Kit Baum   |   Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin   |   http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Stata Programming   |   http://www.stata-press.com/books/isp.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata   |   http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


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