Hello Lars,

I just did a small test of this to make sure, and the ordering/sequence of IDs in the two files does not make a difference when Validating Duplicate Files.

What will cause a problem is if there is a duplicated ID in one of your two files - are you sure that the Case IDs are unique? You should have "KEY UNIQUE 1" included in your .chk file for the ID variable to ensure this.

Kind regards, Charity

On 2/1/07, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:

Dear Epidata_list,

I'm a new member of this list and a fairly new user of the Epidata software.

In attempting to validate duplicate files not entered in same sequence by two observers I have difficulty in performing the test under documebt/validate duplicate files. Attempting to perfom the test with a selected key field of case-id an error is given; "Duplicate keys found" and the validation is terminated.

Is it possible to perform a comparison of the two datasets despite the fact that the registrations are not performed in same sequence with regard to registration of the observations?

Siincerely,

Lars