Help creating a dichotomous variable

[mimosa09]

Hello,

I am doing some work on a dataset looking at infectious disease outcomes and their relationship to socioeconomic variables. I have a continuous "number of people in the household outcome" that I am trying to turn into a dichotomous variable (greater than 5 and less than or equal to 5). The variable currently ranges from 2-16. How can I go about coding this?

Thanks so much for your help!

[ChrisHemedinger]

If I understand you, you want a dummy variable that is true (or 1) if the household is > 5, else it should be 0 (or false). 

This is one simple way to calculate this. Note it doesn't take into account what should happen if the continuous variable has a missing value.

data want;
 set have;
 length is_household_gt_5 8;
 /* assuming household_size is continuous */
 is_household_gt_5 = (houshold_size > 5);
run;