Translation from Narrative Text to Standard Codes Variables with Stata

Abstract

In this article, we describe screening, a new Stata command for data management that can be used to examine the content of complex narrative-text variables to identify one or more user-defined keywords. The command is useful when dealing with string data contaminated with abbreviations, typos, or mistakes. A rich set of options allows a direct translation from the original narrative string to a user-defined standard coding scheme. Moreover, screening is flexible enough to facilitate the merging of information from different sources and to extract or reorganize the content of string variables.