Standard Eurobarometer Meging and harmonization

[Ana Vti]

Hello community!

I am currently working on my master thesis, and one of my dependend variables is environmental concern, for which I am using standard eurobarometer questions from 2002-2023. When I download the data, the variable names are numbered, so I have to rename them for every single eurobarometer before I can merge them all in one big data set, since the question I need might be a different number in different surveys. This is proving to be very time consuming, and I was wondering if there is any way to simplify the process?

Thank you!

[George Ford]

You'll need to dataex for anyone to help much.

[Ana Vti]

George Ford Thank you for the suggestion!

One of my the questions that interest me in the surveys is regarding what europeans perceive the most important issues as well as the regions in each country.

In the Eurobarometer of fall 2007 some of the variable names are and labels are as below (the labels I have not named follow that of France and Belgium for different european countries)

Variable	Label
v117	IMPORTANT ISSUES: ENVIRONMENT PROTECT
v118	IMPORTANT ISSUES: ENERGY
v133	IMPORTANT ISSUES CY-TCC: ENVIRONMENT PROTECT
v134	IMPORTANT ISSUES CY-TCC: ENERGY
v4004	P7 - REGION I FRANCE
v4005	P7 - REGION I BELGIUM
v4006
v4007
v4008
v4009
v4010
v4011
v4012
v4013
v4014
v4015
v4016
v4017
v4018
v4019
v4020
v4021
v4022
v4023
v4024
v4025
v4026
v4027
v4028
v4029
v4030
v4031

On other eurobarometer surveys, on the other hand, althrough there are still questions about important issues on the environment and energy instead of v117/v118 the variable name could be v134/v135

What I want to do is rename them all into the same categories, so that I can then merge them/ clean the data and continue with my analysis.

Hope this is clear and thank you very much!!

[George Ford]

There are (at least) two options.

1. Rename variables in both datasets to permit a merge.
2. Rename variables in one dataset to match the other (create a cross walk; or see if someone has done it already).