Hello.
I am currently working with the BCS70 dataset which is a longitudinal panel study following 17000 individuals over more than 50 years. I plan to use data from 3 waves of the study. Since its a survey that has been interviewing same individuals since, the questions at each sweep differ and thus each data file has different variables. For example, the questions at age 10 sweep don't include questions related to employment and those are included at age 30 sweep. Thus, the variables differ in each sweep.
As for the observations, the number of individuals interviewed in each sweep also vary. Some of the individuals in age 10 sweep are not interviewed at age 30 and vice versa. So, the number of observations and the variables both differ.
I need to combine these datasets but I am not sure how to do that using Stata. I used 1:1 merge command to combine two datasets using the unique identification code given to each individual and although that combined the datasets with different variables, I am not sure how to use the data to conduct panel data analysis?