newspell: Easy management of complex spell data
Abstract. Biographical data gathered in surveys are often stored in spell format,
allowing for overlaps between spell states. On the one hand, these kind of data
provide useful information for researchers. On the other hand, the data structure
is often complex and not easy to handle. The newspell program offers a solution
to the problem of spell-data management with three important features. First, it
can rank spells and cut off overlaps according to the rank order. Second, newspell
can combine overlapping parts of spells into new categories of spells, generating
entirely new states. Third, it can detect gaps in the spell data that are not yet
coded. It also includes subcommands for the management of complex spell data.
Spell states can be merged and filled in with information from adjacent spells, and
the data can be transformed to long or wide format. The command can be used to
clean data, to combine two spell-data sources that have information on different
kinds of states, or to deal with spell data that are complex by survey design.
newspell is useful for users who are not familiar with complex spell data and have
little experience in Stata programming or data management. For experienced
users, newspell saves a lot of time and coding work.
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Hannes Kröger
View all articles with these keywords:
newspell, spell data, data management, complex data
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