I am struggling to perform a 1:m merge on two merge variables that are both string variables. When I attempt the merge, I get the familiar "variables FirstName LastName do not uniquely identify observations in master data" error. So, of course, I run the duplicates command to find my duplicates and figure out a solution.

The problem is that duplicates flag zero duplicates based on the two merge variables. My hunch is that something is going wrong with how these string variables are being stored. One is of the type str35 and the other is strL - I'm not very familiar with strL types.

Does anyone have an idea of why my merge command is flagging duplicates but the duplicates command is not?