Hello all,

I want to somehow join the 5 star levels (click link to see screenshots).

Each star level variables is a sum of how many stars of that level (e.g., 0, 1, 2, 3, 4) are in each census tract. They are scale variables and they are also numeric. As I explained earlier, I want to combine these variable into one variable.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1e_7Wt2gmQbaMGlKYf-HlSbUKg-i7HmiU?usp=sharing

Do the sysmis values mean zero?

What do you want to do with this variable? You could concatenate the values as a string or you could combine them as powers in a numeric form, but neither would be useful for most analytical purposes.

I believe you are speaking about STAR 0? STAR 0 = not star rated. SYSMIS = "."

I am doing a study assessing the association of availability of quality early care and learning centers and childhood obesity in Philadelphia.

Essentially what I want to end up doing is: (1) # of QECLCs divided by # of total ECLCs, (2) ratio or proportion of QECLCs out of all ECLCs in census tracts.

I hope this makes sense!

Note: essentially I need two variables: one that includes all centers and one that contains only quality centers (STARS 2-4). I merged another file into the original survey file. The merged file contained the sum of STARS by rating (0,1, 2, 3, 4) and were matched up to corresponding census tract. For example, 3, STAR rated centers in census tract 3.

I don't know what QECLC and ECLC means, but if you want a simple sum, you can just use the SUM function. e.g.,

compute thesum = sum(star_0 to star_4).

Any missing values in those variables will be ignore.

QECLCs is just an acronym for "Quality Early Care and Learning Centers". Thank you for your assistance. I think I got it!