st: Looking up values in a 2 dimensional table

[Mike Lacy <Michael.Lacy@colostate.edu>]

A colleague of mine has a data file with family income and family 
size for a large sample, with real family income for each of a series 
of years, in the wide format, e.g., something like:

famid FamSize1985 FamSize1987 FamSize1991 ... Inc1985 inc1987 Inc1991 ...

with family sizes and family incomes recorded for about 20 different 
year, not at fixed intervals.

He needs to create a poverty status indicator corresponding to each 
year, based on a 2 dimensional table giving poverty thresholds for 
each value of year and family size.  All the ways I can imagine doing 
this seem relatively clumsy. (Among other things, I thought about 
ways of doing this with a matrix but they would require using the 
value of the family size variable as an index into the matrix, which 
is beyond my ken.)
I also considered something involving reshape and merge, but that 
seemed awkward as well.

Suggestions?

Regards,

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Mike Lacy
Fort Collins CO USA
(970) 491-6721 office






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