Filtering by certain criteria

[Nikki Dee]

I'm having an issue with coding.

So far I have:

gen baselinescore = ( Q1+ Q2+ Q3+ Q4+ Q5+ Q6+ Q7+ Q8+ Q9)

I need to keep only those records where Q1+Q2 >=3. I've tried drop and a few other things but haven't figured it out yet.

Thanks.

[Jay Westreich]

Try this:

gen keep=1 if Q1+Q2>=3
keep if keep==1

[Nikki Dee]

Thank you!

[Clyde Schechter]

Even simpler is just:

keep if Q1 + Q2 >= 3

(Note: This code, as well as the code in #2, will also retain observations where Q1 or Q2 has a missing value, because then Q1+Q2 will itself be missing, and missing value is interpreted as larger than every number. If you don't want to retain those observations, add -& !missing(Q1, Q2)- to the end of that line of code.)