Dealing with repetitive questions or text in a Proc Transpose - sas

Question

Hello I have this data
And I need to perform these edit checks
"If answer to “Did the subject consume the entire high fat/high calorie
breakfast?” is YES, then “If no, did the subject consume at least 50%
of the high fat/high calorie breakfast?” fasting question must not be
present"
"If answer to “Did the subject consume the entire high fat/high calorie
breakfast?” is NO, then “If no, did the subject consume at least 50%
of the high fat/high calorie breakfast?” fasting question must be
present"
"If answer to “Did the subject consume the entire high fat/high calorie
breakfast?” is NO, then answer to “If no, did the subject consume at
least 50% of the high fat/high calorie breakfast?” must be present"
I have written the following code
*data fq;
set dm.fq;
ptno=strip(compress(clientid,'-'))+0;
run;
proc sort;
by ptno period day hour;
run;
proc transpose data=fq out=tempfq (DROP=_NAME_ _LABEL_);
by ptno period day hour;
var fq_yn;
id fq_qst;
run;
data final;
set tempfq;*
However, I get the following error in the log
ERROR: The ID value "DID_THE_SUBJECT_FAST_AT_LEAST_4" occurs twice in the same BY group.
And the headers come out capitalised and truncated
How do I deal with the error in the log and how can I expand the column width to produce the whole question when transposing?

Answer 1

You will need do two things
determine what you want for repeated questions, such as:
for the case of occurs twice in the same BY group.
do you want 2 columns, or
one column from the first occurrence, or
one column from the second occurrence, or
one column with YES if both YES & NO occur, or
one column with NO if both YES & NO occur, or
one column with MULTI if both YES & NO occur, or
one column with YES, NO if they occur in that order per period, day, hour, or
one column with NO, YES if they occur in that order per period, day, hour
one column with NO, YES regardless of order
one column with YES, NO regardless of order
one column with (freq) suffix such as YES(2) or NO(2)
same ideas for cases of BY GROUP replicates of 3 or more
each idea will require some preprocessing of the data before TRANSPOSE
Use IDLABEL to have the whole original question in the column header when output.
Pivoting survey data may be useful for modeling and forecasting purposes, however, if done for reporting purposes you might be better off using Proc TABULATE or Proc REPORT.
Possible 'Fix'
When an ID value occurs more than once in a BY group there are more than one VAR values going into a single pivot destination. Hence the ERROR:
For the case of a question repeated and having the same answer within group ptno period day hour you can SORT by one key more, adding FQ_QST and specify option NODUPKEY. After such sorting no duplicates of FQ_QST occur, only a single FQ_YN value is being pivoted into a column via ID.
proc sort NODUPKEY;
by ptno period day hour FQ_QST;
run;
If you have data with repeated questions within group and the questions have different answers, the answer remaining per NODUPKEY is dependent on how SORT is being run. From help:
When the SORT procedure’s input is a Base SAS engine data set and the sorting is done by SAS, then the order of observations within an output BY group is predictable. The order of the observations within the group is the same as the order in which they were written to the data set when it was created. Because the Base SAS engine maintains observations in the order that they were written to the data set, they are read by PROC SORT in the same order. While processing, PROC SORT maintains the order of the observations because it uses a stable sorting algorithm. The stable sorting algorithm is used because the EQUALS option is set by default. Therefore, the observation that is selected by PROC SORT to be written to the output data set for a given BY group is the first observation in the data set having the BY variable values that define the group.