Missing values for education

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Missing values for education

Dimitris Nikolaou
I have come up recently with a problem. I have the education of
differentpeople for different years. Some years have missing values at the
begining but not afterwards for example:

                 year          education
person1      1995          missing
person1      1996          missing
person1      1997            3
person1      1998            3
person1      1999            2
person2      1996          missing
person2      1998            2
person2      2000            1

I would like to give the value 3 (of year 1997) to the missing values (of
years 1995 and 1996) for person1. For person2 I want to give the value 2 (of
year 1998) to the missing value of year 1996, and so on. I want to repeat
that for every person. Does anyone have a command I can write to the spss'
syntax?

Thanks in advance!

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Re: Missing values for education

Melissa Ives
Seems to me that you would want to use a lag function.  You would need
to determine the best sort order so that what get's lagged is the
correct information and you may have reasons that you would not want to
do a particular sort order (e.g. if the number changes in a given year
you would not change the missing for the prior year?)

Anyway,

To get the changes you specify with the example below, you would

Sort cases by person (a) year (d).
If (person=lag(person) and missing(education)) education=lag(education).
Exe.

Melissa

-----Original Message-----
From: SPSSX(r) Discussion [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of
Dimitris Nikolaou
Sent: Saturday, September 30, 2006 6:56 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [SPSSX-L] Missing values for education

I have come up recently with a problem. I have the education of
differentpeople for different years. Some years have missing values at
the begining but not afterwards for example:

                 year          education
person1      1995          missing
person1      1996          missing
person1      1997            3
person1      1998            3
person1      1999            2
person2      1996          missing
person2      1998            2
person2      2000            1

I would like to give the value 3 (of year 1997) to the missing values
(of years 1995 and 1996) for person1. For person2 I want to give the
value 2 (of year 1998) to the missing value of year 1996, and so on. I
want to repeat that for every person. Does anyone have a command I can
write to the spss'
syntax?

Thanks in advance!

_________________________________________________________________
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