@stephcolter wrote: Im well aware... ive done this before i'm just rusty on my sas... SEQN is a unique identifer for each individual person regardless of them being apart of a household... these numbers are not duplicated thus why we used SEQN to merge datasets
The issue is not the variable SEQN. The issues are 1) all of the other variables and 2) the numbers of observations
Here is some code that relatively easily shows you whether a variable is duplicated between data sets and the variable type.
Proc sql;
create table work.vars as
select memname, name, type
from dictionary.columns
where libname='WORK' and memname in ("CDQ_J", "DBQ_J", "DEMO_J", "DXX_J", "PAQ_J", "WHQ_J")
;
run;
proc format;
value putx
1-High ='X'
other = ' '
;
run;
proc tabulate data=work.vars;
class memname name type;
table name*type,
memname*n=' '*f=putx.
;
run;
You didn't mention what your library where the data sets are stored would be. Put that in the LIBNAME= in the proc sql. This should be in uppercase as the dictionary tables, which stores the characteristics of all the variables available in your current SAS session, stores library and data set (Memname) as upper case. The format places an X in the body of a report table with the data sets as column headers. Where you see an X then the variable exists in the data set.
The type, N=numeric and C=character may help prevent errors when combining this data in any way.
If you have Labels assigned to the variables you may want to incorporate those as well to show common names with different labels (often indicating different meaning).
Large economy size hint: If you use data from CDC data sets from multiple years you really really want to do such a comparison. CDC routinely in some of the projects reuses variable names with very drastic differences from year to year.
I developed the above report matrix to deal with CDC BRFSS data where I was going to use 20 years of data. Some of the variables with the exact same name appeared in 15 or more sets with as many as 8 different meanings (think question).
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