There is, in effect, an extra rule not stated
here: date formats are ignored by -summarize-.
Why? One can only guess:
1. Perhaps the developers just thought it unlikely
that people really wanted that, or never got round
to implementing it.
2. Also, a problem with date formats is that it is not
obvious that the date format should be followed
for all statistics. I guess that a user might want
the mean, min, max etc. to be given as dates,
but not the standard deviation, but is that
correct. The variance of dates would
have rather strange units. Skewness and kurtosis
naturally have no units.
3. Another awkward problem is this: would there be
enough space in the -summarize, detail- display?
I guess 1. is the key.
-codebook- pays some attention to date formats,
as I recall.
On SSC, see -datesum-, -summdate-, perhaps others.
(The -findit- database doesn't show SSC materials
at this instant.)
Nick
[email protected]
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