Hello All ---
I am using Stata Intercooled, v.8.2.
Suppose I want to take a systematic sample, that is, I want to sort
then keep every 5th observation, of a fictitious dataset. Aside from
going into the data editor and manually deleting observations one-by-one
(or using a series of drop/keep commands), is there a more elegant way
to do this?? My initial idea was to generate a new variable using the
_n system variable then keeping only those observations divisible by,
say, five. Example:
sort varname
gen obsno = _n
keep if (obsno/5)
The above does not return any errors, but it does not drop any
observations either. I concede that this is contrived and rarely used
in practice, nevertheless, I am interested in knowing if this can be
done w/ a few commands.
Many Thanks,
Clint Thompson
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