sex of the first born child

[KA MANCHA]

hi stata user ,

I'm having trouble in generating sex of the first born child. can anyone help me ?

information I have in the data
unit of analysis : mother
total number of children
sex by birth order
for eg b4_01(most recent birth) .......b4_19(first born)

how can generate sex of the first born /?

[Nick Cox]

* initialise: only the right answer for a mother with 19 children
gen wanted = b4_19

* count down 18 ... 1 making sure that 9 8 ... 2 1 are mapped to 09 08 ... 02 01.

quietly forval k = 18(-1)1 {
    local K : display %02.0f `k'
    replace wanted = b4_`K' if missing(wanted)
}

[KA MANCHA]

Thank you Nick Cox !
It worked

[Nick Cox]

You could also go

gen wanted = b4_01 

forval k = 2/19 { 
      local K : display %02.0f `k' 
      replace wanted = b4_`K' if !missing(b4_`K') 
}

[KA MANCHA]

Nick Cox Hi nick,
Thank you for help!

I was able get sex of the 2nd born 3rd born and so on by using chain of commands. Is there a simpler and shorter ways of doing this?

where b4_* is birth order b4_20 is last born ....b4_01 most recent birth
v201 is # of children to a mother
wanted birth order=1
wanted 2 birth order = 2
Wanted 3 birth order = 3 and so on

Also attaching my Stata output for the reference.

[Nick Cox]

Please read and act on FAQ Advice #12 and give a decent data example, not screenshots.