This thread has taken a bizarre twist--Zamira Simkins
<[email protected]> replied to a question long ago asked and
answered, after 5 days and 17 hours, to be more exact. She provided a
technique that was incomplete (she did not address Scott's question of
how to create hhid), typo-laden (putting -egen- for -gen- and "age<19"
defining children, which is not a test of majority, in the US at
least, ignoring state law in places like Alabama), inefficient (2
egens and a replace), and potentially error-prone (what does the
max() function do for you when there are two moms in the HH?).
How exactly is this a triumph of clarity over brevity? The first
answer was not optimally efficient in processing time or memory use,
but a model of clarity compared to Zamira's approach:
egen hhid=group(ent mun numviv numhog)
g kid=age<18
egen nkids=sum(kid), by(hhid)
As for the claim due to Neil Shephard <[email protected]> that
"A further problem with this is that it also assumes that children are
literally that, ie. they are considered to be legally considered as
children."
Well. Hmm. It is a problem defining children as children?
If Scott Cunningham <[email protected]> had wanted to count
biological children, he would have said so, and it would not make
sense to count them at the household level, probably. "In the field
of human genetics" would you count adopted children or only offspring
when answering Scott's question?
Now foster children, counting kids at the family level, that's tricky.
Perhaps there's something about that in the FAQ that Nick Cox so
kindly provided the URL for?
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/data/members.html
Only one way to know--read it.
On 2/28/06, David Bell <[email protected]> wrote:
> There are advantages to brevity. On the other hand, there are also
> advantages to clarity. When I was a programmer (self employed), I
> preferred Michael's brief approach. However, now that I work with
> research teams including students, I have found that Zamira's more
> verbose approach has its own distinct advantages.
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