Use given month variable or create own?

[buscandoaverroes]

I've been using the given month variable in the survey data for consistency, but sometimes the data don't really make sense. For example, April 2017's lmonth shows data from January and October. It just so happens that I need a variable to say only "April" for coding reasons for this year. But a larger question -- how should we generate "round" or "wave" variable data? Should this data come from the dataset itself -- with potential quirks and all -- or should we generate this variable manually?

[gronert-m]

@buscandoaverroes I think, given that for all cases I have seen the data from April corresponds to what the PSA publishes as April data, that is, the file name seems to be correct I think it is fair to write the month as April or wave/round as Q2.

[buscandoaverroes]

@gronert-m Ok, sure. And do you think there's a need to preserve the original variable svymo (with data showing from "other months") in these cases, or is it appropriate to just provide the manually-created one?

Also, How far should this rule be taken safely? Should month in all survey rounds in all years be corrected to match the month that corresponds to the round, something like:

gen month = round // where `round` is a factor variable generated by iecodebook to indicate the survey data file source

[buscandoaverroes]

Conclusion: since month data is much cleaner than I thought, I will use a manual label as you suggest