To -*contract- and then to -merge- to get back to
the original data, plus some, is a double cross-continental
journey when you could stay at home. You might enjoy the
travel, but there's a simpler way.
You need to master -by:-, as someone I believe suggested
in the original thread. All these commands
such as -contract-, -xcontract- and -groups-
are just variation exercises on the use of -by:-.
There is a somewhat long-winded tutorial at
How to move step by: step.
Stata Journal 2(1): 86-102 (2002)
that explains the use of -by:- to tackle
a variety of problems with group structure, ranging from
simple calculations for each of several groups to more
advanced manipulations that use the built-in _n and _N.
But the key ideas are all in the manual, just scattered
around a few short sections.
In your case
bysort religion race gender : gen long _freq = _N
would solve your example in a single bound.
Incidentally, -groups- as recommended by Svend Juul
gets you a table without a restructure, although it
does not -generate- anything, even optionally.
Nick
[email protected]
Lawrence Hanser
> Thanks, xcontract worked perfectly.
>
> Now I have an additional question. My dataset of cell frequencies
> (created by xcontract) has something like 140,000 observations. My
> original dataset has 648,000 observations. I need to attach the cell
> frequencies back to the original dataset. I thought this would be
> something like -merge, but it wants unique observations...
>
> Imagine something like this in the original data:
>
> religion race gender
> 1 1 1
> 1 1 1
> 1 1 2
> 1 2 1
> 1 2 1
>
> the data created by -xcontract are:
>
> religion race gender _freq
> 1 1 1 2
> 1 1 2 1
> 1 2 1 2
>
> I want my original dataset to be:
>
> religion race gender _freq
> 1 1 1 2
> 1 1 1 2
> 1 1 2 1
> 1 2 1 2
> 1 2 1 2
>
> I tried -merge ....., uniqusing
> where my frequency dataset was the using dataset, but it was still
> looking for unique values of the -merge varlist in the master dataset.
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