I'm hoping that I am just missing something simple. I have figures for a benchmark year that are assigned quintiles based on how the local county figure compares to a national figure. I want to apply these benchmark cutpoints to the same calculations for future year(s) using the xtile command with cutpoints. Can't seem to make it work, no matter how I try it. This is the basic technique I am using:
xtile [new varname] = [var containing the numbers I want separated into quintiles], cut[benchmark figure quintiles]
Using this technique (and many variations of it), I can't use nq(5) to identify how many cutpoints. Any suggestions? Is there a better way?
Thanks
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