Hi all,

I have survey data collected across 4 waves for households in Ireland. Each wave is provided as a separate .dta file, i.e. Wave1.dta, Wave2.dta, etc. For each wave of data a weight is included to make that wave reflect the population of Ireland, i.e. number of single mothers, number receiving social welfare, etc. My question is, currently I am cleaning this data in Stata, in each wave I am recoding things that are useful to my analysis and that appear in multiple waves in order to combine all four waves into one larger .dta file, with the goal to xtset this as panel data to complete a fixed effects analysis in. At the end of cleaning each wave.dta is there a way I could apply the weights to the entire wave dataset (i.e. apply the weight for Wave 1 to Wave1.dta) such that each wave will represent the larger population, and then combine the waves into the larger post cleaning dataset ready for panel analysis? Is this approach of cleaning and reweighting each wave and then combining them all together even correct?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated,

Very best,

John