I'm trying to distribute demographic information across several records with a retain statement. I'll give a data example:

obs id time race gender 1 1 1 W M 2 1 2 . . 3 1 3 . .

I want race and gender to appear for id #1 on all three of his records (along with 6000 other people). My method was:

1 proc sort; by id time; 2 data; by id; 3 retain demog2; 4 if first.id then demog2=race; 5 demog2=demog2; 6 data; 7 drop race; 8 rename demog2=race;

This has always seemed strange to me - that 'demog2=demog2' line. But it worked, so I didn't question it. Unfortunately, when I ran the gender analysis this way (substituting demog2=gender into line 4), it didn't work. So I'm wondering what the proper syntax is. I can't seem to find a passage in the manual that deals with this specifically (which baffles me, but that's another post).

-- Kyle Dane Programmer/Analyst - UCSF Division of Geriatrics kdane@medicine.ucsf.edu - 415-514-0714

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