Re: st: Cleaning Survey Data

[Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com>]

Erika, see reshape:
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?reshape

also see egen anymatch
http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?egen

here is the anymatch solution which can get you started:
do http://radyakin.org/statalist/2014/20140205_1305.do

It is not clear whether one person can make duplicate choices
(duplication within the row) or they are mutually exclusive? also can
other be "Milk"? etc.


Best, Sergiy

On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Erika Kociolek <ekociole@gmail.com> wrote:
> When working with survey data - specifically closed-ended, multiple
> response questions - datasets are often structured like this:
>
> Q1_R1 Q1_R2 Q1_R3 Q1_ROTHER
> 1           3        98       "lemons"
> 2
> 1           2
>
> I ultimately want to know the number of respondents that selected 1,
> 2, 3, 98, so I write code that looks something like this:
>
> local values 1 2 3 98
>
> foreach x of local values {
>     generate Q1_`x'_flag = `x' if (Q1_R1 == `x' | Q1_R2 == `x' | Q1_R3 == `x')
> }
>
> Is there a better way to get to the goal (what's below)?
>
> label define Q1_1_label "Milk"
> label values Q1_1_flag Q1_1_label
> label define Q1_2_label "Bread"
> label values Q1_2_flag Q1_2_label
> label define Q1_3_label "Apples"
> label values Q1_3_flag Q1_3_label
> label define Q1_98_label "Other"
> label values Q1_98_flag Q1_98_label
>
> Q1_1_flag   Q1_2_flag   Q1_3_flag   Q1_98_flag
> 1                                  1               1
>                   1
> 1                1
>
> It can be tedious to type out "if (Q1_R1 == | Q1_R2 == | Q1_R3 == |
> ...)" when different questions have different numbers of variables and
> there are many possible responses to a given question (i.e. Q1_R1
> through Q1_R17).
>
> Thanks for any advice you have.
>
> Best,
> Erika
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