Sabre

 

Dunn (1992) reported data for the 12-item version of Goldberg's (1972) General Health Questionnaire for psychological distress. The questionnaire was completed by 12 students on 2 dates, 3 days apart. The data are repeated in the table below, the same data were used by Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal (2005, exercise 1.2).

 

Data description

 

Number of observations (rows): 12
Number of variables (columns): 3

 

Variables

 

student: student identifier {1,2,...,12}
ghq1: psychological distress score at occasion 1
ghq2: psychological distress score at occasion 2

 

 

 

Stata dataset ghq.dta

 

The ghq.dta dataset contains variables ghq1 and ghq2 giving the psychological distress score for students on two separate occasions. To reshape the data from wide into long format and create a single score variable ghq, we can use

 

reshape long ghq, i(student) j(r)
tab r, gen(r)
sort student r
rename r1 dg1
rename r2 dg2
save ghq2, replace

 

This also creates a response indicator variable r, the associated dummy variables dg1 and dg2 and saves the file ghq2.dta.

 

Variables

 

r: response occasion 1, 2
student: student identifier {1,2,,12}
ghq: psychological distress score at occasion
dg1: 1, if the response occasion is 1, 0 otherwise
dg2: 1, if the response occasion is 2, 0 otherwise

 

The data set was saved as ghq2.dta

 

 

 

ghq2.dta

 

This data set can now be read directly into Sabre, see for example Exercise L1.