Dear Bola:

This might indeed a bit tricky as EpiData does not have a "reshape" command. However, once you master the principle, it is straight forward.

1) The merging process is done in EpiData Analysis 2) You read the CHILD.REC and MERGE the PARENT.REC to it: read child.rec /merge=parent.rec savedata child_parent.rec /replace 3) Now you have as many records as there are in the child.rec or one could say you have "examinations" rather than "examinees". This is sufficient for many purposes, for instance if you have a continuous variable like plasma glucose and you are interested in means, over all observations, by patient, by sex, or any other characteristics, and EpiData Analysis does this quite superbly. 4) If you need to end up with "examinees" and for each of them you need the result of each examination, it gets a bit more complex. You need first to know what the maximum number of examinations (child records) for each examinee is and then you need to create as many variables as this number for each variable, eg, if you have a field pg (plasma glucose) in the child record and you have up to five child records per examinee, you need 5 vairable, ie, bs1, bs2,...,bs5 and then "reshuffle" the information from the "long-to-wide". You can find a detailed account and step by step instructions with an example on how this is done at the web site www.tbrieder.org: go to EpiData, Part D, Exercise 1.

I hope this helps getting you on track.

Hans

On 20:59, epidata-list@lists.umanitoba.ca wrote:

Hi all,

Please how can I make parent and child datafile merge into one single file when converting the data to SPSS.

Thank you.

Bola Nigeria