Stata Loops

[Lily Johnson]

Dear all,

I have a long occupational dataset with several rows of observations for each person representing different jobs they have worked over their lifetime. Each person is identified with a unique ID number.

I have start year and finish year variables for each job, but I need to create start month and finish month variables to get a more specific exposure duration.

I have decided that depending on the start and finish years of each consecutive job, the start month will be assigned as either June/January, and the finish month assigned as July/December.

The rules are as follows:

- If the finish year of the previous job is the same as the start year of the subsequent job, the stop/start months for those jobs will be assigned as June/July.
- If the finish year of the previous job is the year before the start year of the next job, the stop/start months for those jobs will be assigned as December/January.

I am trying to write some code in STATA.

I have tried to create a loop to make the code run through each unique ID number, and then run through each individual row for that ID number. However, it currently doesn´t work and I am not sure how to write the "if" command to assign the correct start/finish months from the multiple rows of data.


Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Carole J. Wilson]

You will be much more likely to get a helpful response if you provide a data example (including a variable "wanted" to show what you expect in the example data). Be sure to use the dataex command described in the FAQ https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#stata.