I agree largely with Niels.
Although there may well be a -rowsort- solution, with these data I would recommend instead creating and staying within a different data structure. The moderately unfashionable -stack- is here a transparent alternative to -reshape-.
stack ID M1 Birth_dateM1 ID M2 Birth_dateM2 ID M3 Birth_dateM3, into(ID M Birth_date) clear
sort ID M
then gets the order you want.
I wouldn't -reshape- back. This data structure makes many things easier.
Nick
[email protected]
Niels Schenk
This should do the trick:
reshape long M Birth_dateM, i(ID) j(suf)
bys ID (M): replace suf = _n
reshape wide M Birth_dateM, i(ID) j(suf)
On Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:28:07 +0200, "[email protected]"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks Nick and Martin for your answers and help.
>
> Rowsort is a great tool and could be one solution (by the way it will
help
> me with other problems not mentioned here). However, I will describe my
> (original) problem in greater detail and describe why rowsort may not be
> the best solution (sorry for the earlier (and poor) description of my
> problem):
>
> My dataset contains detailed information on organizational members (e.g.
> their date of entry). However, the dataset is not well structured, i.e.
in
> some cases there is a member1 and a member3 while a member 2 is missing.
In
> these cases, member3 is obviously member2. At this point, rowsort would
> help me fixing the problem. Using rowsort member1 would be the member
that
> entered the organization at first, member2 would be the member that
entered
> the organization at second, and so on.
>
> However, my dataset includes additional information about the members,
as
> for example, their birth date. If I use rowsort to “rank” the members of
> the organizations, birth dates do not fit any longer. Additionally, I
could
> not use rowsort to rank the birth dates, since the member that entered
> first may not be the youngest.
>
> My dataset looks like this (still simplified…). M1, M2 and M3 are the
> times of entry of the members.
>
> ID M1 M2 M3 Birth_dateM1 Birth_dateM2 Birth_dateM3
> 1 100 50 200 1970 1980
> 1960
> 2 ...
> 3 …
>
> And should look like this:
>
> ID M1 M2 M3 Birth_dateM1 Birth_dateM2 Birth_dateM3
> 1 50 100 200 1980 1970
> 1960
> 2 ...
> 3 …
>
>
> Do you have any idea how to fix this problem (is there a solution within
> rowsort)?
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