Difficulty creating a filter

[dirussell]

Good evening.

I have a data set and am trying to set up filters to run analyses between two groups: current symptoms vs no current symptoms.

A participant's group allocation is dependent on 7 symptom variables ( the data I received has these columns named C5_3 to C5_9). Data is ordinal as follows:

Rarely or never
A few days a week
A few days a month
Every or almost every day

If a participant answers with "A few days a week" or higher for at least two variables, they are deemed to be experiencing current symptoms.

I managed a filter with every variable answered as "Rarely or never" which works great. The rest is trickier.

I could do the same but with just C5_3 answered as "A few days a week" as a filter, then repeat with C5_4, C5_5, etc. Then repeat the process twice again with the remaining two responses. This just feels like a lot of work, and that I'm overthinking this problem!

Any suggestion of more efficient methods would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

Dan.

[sbalci]

I hope I did not get this wrong but how about coding them into 0,1,2,3 and then take sum of 7 symptoms.
If sum is zero than it is never. If sum is >=2 then they are the symptomatic ones.