Hello,

I've got a dataset with rows specific to an individual and columns specific to certain themes (coded as 0 (no) or 1 (yes) depending on whether the theme was reported). I want to generate a new variable that is a summary of all the themes reported so I can quickly compare how many people reported each theme and also look at variations in the frequencies of themes across specific demographic groups. To create a single variable that captures all the themes reported, I have done the following:

gen all_themes=.
replace all_themes=0 if theme1==1
replace all_themes=1 if theme2==1
replace all_themes=2 if theme3==1
etc

However this fails to capture multiple themes that have been reported by the same person (if they report theme1 and theme3 they would only be recorded as having theme3 based on the (probably very inefficient) method I'm using above).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

With many thanks,
Johanna