This page introduces code for taking MCS UKDS End User Licence zipped Stata (.dta) files, unzipping them and placing into per-sweep folders. The code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/CLS-Data/make-directories-mcs.

To use the code, first download or clone the GitHub directory.

• To download the directory, on the GitHub website, click Code -> Download ZIP (see screenshot below) then unzip the downloaded file and place it in a suitable location on your computer.
• To clone the directory, open your computer’s command line or terminal, navigate to an appropriate location (cd ...) and type git clone https://github.com/CLS-Data/make-directories-mcs. You may want to rename the folder from make-directories-mcs to MCS or something similar.

When the folder is downloaded, open the README.md file and follow the instructions therein. You will need to download R and RStudio, as well as the appropriate MCS Stata (.dta) files from the UK Data Service. The README.md file lists the UKDS asset numbers of the files the code will work for.

Once completed, the folder should look like the below. You will see the code also creates a data dictionary (in .csv and R [.Rdata] formats). You can use this to efficiently search for variables.