Progam Library

Program Library

These programs have been provided to help you get started with the HILDA data and can be downloaded.

Provided by the HILDA team

Match files

The programs showing how to match files are:

Add Partner Variables

Some users may want to include variables for a respondent’s partner in their analyses. The programs showing how to utilise the partner’s crosswave identifier _hhpxid to add partner variables onto the responding person file are:

Create Longitudinal Files

There are a number of ways users might want to create a balanced longitudinal file:

Most users will probably want to restrict the files to only include respondents or people from responding households. A few users may also want to add people who have died or moved out of scope (depending on the research question they are answering).

The programs showing how to create balanced long files of responding persons are:

The wide files are created by matching the responding or enumerated files for each wave together using xwaveid. An alternative way to strip off the first letter of the variable names in SAS is provided in:

Some users may want to create an unbalanced panel – where you take all respondents or enumerated persons available at each wave (not just those that consistently respond or are consistently in responding households). An example Stata program to create a balanced or unbalanced panel is provided in:

Example programs to create wide files are provided in:

The longitudinal weights on the enumerated person file and the responding person file are for the full balanced panel of respondents and enumerated persons from wave 1 (i.e., across the first two, three, ... nine waves). If you are constructing a balanced panel with different specifications, you should find a suitable weight in the longitudinal weights file. Out of scopes (deaths and moves overseas) are treated as acceptable outcomes, so these people have weights applied as well.

Provided by HILDA Users

Users of the HILDA data can contribute code to this library if they believe it may be beneficial to other users. Please send your code to [email protected]. The HILDA team does not take responsibility for the correctness of these programs.

See also PanelWhiz, which provides a common front end to a range of panel datasets (including HILDA) which allows users to select vectors of variables and the matching and merging is done automatically.

Endnotes:

1 This program requires at least 1.3gb memory to run. If your computer does not have this much memory then you will need to restrict the datasets to only the subset of variables you need.