newspell—Easy Management of Complex Spell Data

Hannes Kroeger
Additional contact information
Hannes Kroeger: DIW Berlin

German Stata Users' Group Meetings 2013 from Stata Users Group

Abstract: Biographical data gathered in surveys is often stored in spell format, allowing for overlaps between spell states. This gives useful information to researchers but leaves them with a very complex data structure, which is not easy to handle. I present my work on the ado-package newspell. It includes several subprograms for management of complex spell data. Spell states can be merged, reducing the overall number of spells. newspell allows a user to fill gaps with information from spells before and after the gap, given a user-defined preference. However, the two most important features of newspell are, first, the ability to rank spells and cut off overlaps according to the rank order. This is a necessary step before performing, for example, sequence analysis on spell data. Second, newspell can combine overlapping spells into new categories of spells, generating entirely new states. This is useful for cleaning data, for analyzing simultaneity of states, or for combining two spell datasets that have information on different kinds of states (for example, labor market and marital status). newspell is useful for users who are not familiar with complex spell data and have little experience in Stata programming for data management. For experienced users, it saves a lot of time and coding work.

Date: 2013-07-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/dsug2013/kroeger_DESUG2013.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:boc:dsug13:04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in German Stata Users' Group Meetings 2013 from Stata Users Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum ().