Sometimes when you are working with nested data (such as household surveys, with data on all individuals in the household), analysis focuses on dyads (such as spouse pairs) rather than individual cases. This means you need to link data in one observation with that in another. As long as the data includes information in ego’s record about where alter’s record is (e.g., by holding alter’s ID as a variable), the simplest way to do this is to create a separate data file, where the alter ID variable is renamed to ID, and the substantive variables are also renamed, and to match it back in to the original data. This is not terribly difficult, but it is messy, so I present here a more convenient method.
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