To link the individual waves into a panel database, you use mflip with the –p option. For more information about mflip, see Running mflip.

In a non-levels job, the program expects to find a serial.alp file in each wave directory, and expects it to be sorted in ascending order. If either of these conditions is not true, the run terminates with an appropriate error message. Like flip, mflip –p has been written to allow for missing serial numbers.

In a levels job, the program expects to find the file serial1.alp in each wave directory, sorted as described above. It also looks for any other serialn.alp files for values of n defined in the levels file, but does not complain if none exist.