st: Creating variables with values taken from other observations

[Mark McCann <mark.mccann@qub.ac.uk>]

Hello folks,


I've worked out a way to do this using excel, but I'd much prefer to keep everything in Stata instead of jumping back and forward every time I generate a variable along these lines.


My data has three variables 

Respondent ID  -  Friend ID - Respondent Characteristic

The best friend ids all correspond to another respondent's ID. 

I want to create a variable - best friend's characteristic.

For each observation I want to take that observation's friend ID, find the observation that has this friend id value as its value for respondent ID, read this observation's characteristic value and create a new variable taking the characteristic's value for the original observation.



Question again in table format because I know that description wasn't very clear


I have data like this

Rid	Fid	Gender

1	2	Female
2	5	Male
5	7	Missing
.	.	.
.	.	.


How do I create this?


Rid	Fid	Gender		Fgender

1	2	Female		Male
2	5	Male		Missing
5	7	Missing	etc.
.	.	.		.
.	.	.		.

Is there a way to do this in Stata? I used gender as a reader-friendly example however I will be using predominantly numeric coding.


	Many thanks,		
		Mark McCann


Research Statistician
Improving Children's Lives 
Institute of Child Care Research
Queen's University Belfast
6 College Park
Belfast BT7 1LP

Tel: +44(0)28 9097 3163

Improvingchildrenslives.org


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