Understanding Society User Support

Hello,

I wish to perform some longitudinal analysis and I aim to append waves 9-13 from UKHLS. Before appending the waves, I wanted to first merge the corresponding wave's hhresp files to each indresp file of that wave. However, in most waves, it seems that after merging the hh info to the individual file, many observations stay unmatched both in my indresp and hhresp files. I attended an understanding society seminar a few years ago, where one of the exercises stated explicitly that although it is likely that from a certain HH no one filled any individual questionnaire in a given wave, it should not be the case that someone appears in the indresp file but there is no HH information on them from the hhresp file. I also found a document on the study design by Peter Lynn, which if I understood correctly, suggests that should be the case too. I am quite confused as with every wave I have tried, (using the merge command on stata as per the UKHLS suggested online syntax) I always get "unmatched" people for whom there is no HH info. I would appreciate any help in explaining this, whether it is potentially an error of the survey or an error of my code.

Many thanks in advance for your time.

Best wishes,
Marina