Oooops - don't mind me, I think I have just figured out a solution
after reading
David Elliott's email. I can put all the variables' names in a
global, loop through the global list and -ds- each variable on the
list, and if the return code is 0 then I add it to a final list, where
I'll then use it to draw varibles out from the datasets.
However if you have some good suggestions please fireaway anyway! Cheers!!
On 11/4/06, Ada Ma <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Statalist,
I want to draw out a set of variables from the QLFS from all 1992 to
2005. I can do a loop to loop through all the years and quarters,
however, getting the variables out is a bit tricky.
Most of the variables keep the same name throughout the 14 years, but
there are a good number where they had changed names, only appear in
Spring and Autumn and not others, only introduced some years after the
series started, etc. For example gross pay is called GROSS99 from
1999, but EMPGRO in years prior to that. A Cohabitating dummy was
introduced in 2000. Then new Standardised Occupational Classification
code was introduced in 2001. These are just three out of many changes
that had been introduced to the data set through years.
Is there anyway to get around this so that I may pull out all the
variables I would like to get, if they're available, without having
set up an unique varlist for each and every one of the datasets?
There are 57 quarters and quite a good number of variables I'd like to
pull out. The alternative would be to append all 57 quarters and then
pull out the vars, but the datasets are rather big so it's not an
option that is open to me given the computers I have access to.
Many thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Ada
Ada
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--
Ada Ma
Research Fellow
Health Economics Research Unit
University of Aberdeen, UK.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/heru/
Tel: +44 (0) 1224 553863
Fax: +44 (0) 1224 550926
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