Re: st: matching children and parents

[Jeph Herrin <stata@spandrel.net>]

The lookup problem is one I often run into in Stata. That is, retrieving a value for a variable using a (unique!) 
identifier from another.

One solution I have used is to store the variable of interest in a matrix. If (!) your ID is a unique string, then you can

  mkmat education, matrix(E) rownames(ID)
  gen motheredu= el("E",rownumb("E",motherID),1)


hth,
Jeph




On 6/12/2013 3:45 AM, Andrea Smurra wrote:
> Hello everyone.
> I am dealing with a big household survey.
> I am interested in child labor and education and my objective is to create variables for each children representing parents or household' characteristics.
> In particular, for each children I created two variables specifying the IDs of mother and father. Now I would like to create a  variable that, for each children, specifies parents' education in the following way
>
> motheredu_i=education[motherID_i]
>
> where education is a variable already in the dataset
>
> I know a way to do this, but it is extremely time consuming and I was wondering what would be the syntax to create the above "function".
>
> Thanks.
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