conditional coding question

I have a big dataset. I want to create a new factor variable with certain
conditions based on two existing numeric variables. 
Existing variables: indinc (range: 0 to 16), groupinc (range -3 to 5)
Conditional values that 'incorp' will take:
If groupinc = 5, then ?cons?;
If groupinc is -3 : -2, AND indinc <  9, then  ?ethnat?;
If groupinc is -2 : -1, AND indinc > 8, then ?civic?;
If groupinc is 1 : 4, AND indinc > 8, then ?libmul?;
The rest of the values should be coded as NA.
#here is my code after attaching the data (4408 is the number of
observations):#
incorp <-
You are making an inappropriate double assignment. This assignment will shoot off your foot.  I believe that for loops return NULL, so even if your loop succeeded in making all the assignments inside the body which it did not and I believe could not even with syntactic surgery for the reason expanded on below, the incorp value would be NULL afterward.
incorp= 1:10; incorp <- for (i in seq_along(incorp) ) { incorp[i] = 2*incorp[i] }
incorp
NULL
 for (i in 1:4408) {
   if (groupinc[i] == 5) {
     incorp[i] = 'cons'
   } else if ((groupinc[i] == -3:-2) & (indinc[i] < 9)) {
I doubt very much that you should be testing for (groupinc[i] == -3:-2)

I suspect you what to be testing whether groupinc[i] is in the range -3 to -2

For that you have a couple of choices. If you know for a fact that groupinc[i] will be integer valued (and is not really a double/float value then you could do:

if ( groupinc[i[ %in% -3:-2 )

If group inc[i] is a floating point number you should test:

if( groupinc[i] >= -3 & groupinc[i] <= -2)
     incorp[i] = 'ethnat'
   } else if ((groupinc[i] == 1:4) & (indinc[i] > 8)) {
     incorp[i] = 'libmul'
   } else if ((groupinc[i] == -2:-1) & (indinc[i] > 8)) {
     incorp[i] = 'civic' 
   } else = NA
 }
#error message#
Error: unexpected '=' in:
"      incorp[i] = 'civic' 
   } else ="
That is a syntactic error, but I suspect you have semantic errors as mentioned above.

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conditional coding question

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