newspell—Easy Management of Complex Spell Data

Biographical data gathered in surveys is often stored in spell format, allowing for overlaps between spell states. This gives useful information to researchers but leaves them with a very complex data structure, which is not easy to handle. I present my work on the ado-package newspell. It includes several subprograms for management of complex spell data. Spell states can be merged, reducing the overall number of spells. newspell allows a user to fill gaps with information from spells before and after the gap, given a user-defined preference. However, the two most important features of newspell are, first, the ability to rank spells and cut off overlaps according to the rank order. This is a necessary step before performing, for example, sequence analysis on spell data. Second, newspell can combine overlapping spells into new categories of spells, generating entirely new states. This is useful for cleaning data, for analyzing simultaneity of states, or for combining two spell datasets that have information on different kinds of states (for example, labor market and marital status). newspell is useful for users who are not familiar with complex spell data and have little experience in Stata programming for data management. For experienced users, it saves a lot of time and coding work.