Thanks for the input, Tom and PaigeMiller. I appreciate it.
To make a long story short, I calculate quartiles for certain subgroups in a large population, which work as reference quartiles for a subgroup which is nested within the abovementioned population subgroup. Specifically, I calculate the "overall" quartiles and then I use these to categorize a subgroup nested within the overall subgroup. More specifically, I take a general population, compute quartiles within certain age groups, and then categorize a diseased population according to these quartiles within the same age groups for the diseased population. Moreover, I do this for each year (seperate datasets). Therefore, my intuition tells me that the use of macro variables is reasonable, but I would be happy to hear whether or not you agree.
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