Hi,
I have a data set (European Social Survey) with several variables indicating the respondents' and parents' country of birth. The values for these string variables (which I know that I can convert) are mostly letters (some are numbers and I am not sure what they mean but I can set them to missing). There is no value label.
The ESS uses a common letter system for countries (ISO 3166-1) and I have copied them into a Stata file by country. What I want to do is to edit that file and assign values by groups of countries (e.g., Nordic countries, English speaking countries, etc.) to get groups that fit a theoretical pattern (don't worry about this). The next step would be to sort by these numerical value labels (or values for a new variable to create new variables such as born in Nordic countries, born in English speaking countries, born in transition countries, etc.
Now I know that I can do this by hand (e.g., gen bornsoutherneurope if cntbrtha == ES | cntbrtha == GR etc). But this would be a rather long and tedious process. Is there any way to take the country codes (now in a file with country name--which can be deleted and with a region code that I could add) and create new variables from it?
Thanks,
Ric
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
