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Assigning characteristics of head of household to the entire household [message #1256] Mon, 27 January 2014 18:04 Go to previous message
ssysahan is currently offline  ssysahan
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Registered: January 2014
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I am trying to merge individual men and women files to the household files so that I can assign the ethnicity of the head of the household to each household (the ethnicity variable is only available in the individual files). I am using Ghana DHS4 (GHIR41DT, GHMR41DT, GHHR41DT). There are 4,843 women; 1,549 men; and 6,003 households.

To do this, I first merge men and women files to household files independently in Stata, following the instructions on the website:

merge m:1 v001 v002 using [household level file]
merge m:1 mv001 mv002 using [household level file]

I then append both files to create a dataset with individual men and individual women, each referenced to a household. However, there are still about 1,700 of the 6,003 households that are not matched to any individual respondents. Therefore I can't assign ethnicities to these households, which was the main goal of merging in the first place.

On top of this, I should be able to identify the head of the household because the respondent's line number should be equal to 1. But when I use the commands "tab v003" and "tab mv003", the number of respondents with line number equal to 1 does not equal the total number of households. Shouldn't this be the case if the merge occurred properly (i.e., for every household there should be a respondent with line number equal to 1 for the household head).

My questions are:
1) Am I correctly merging the files?
2) If my end goal is to assign the ethnicity of the household head to each household, is this the right way to go about it?
 
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