Re: st: Criteria for stratification??

["Heather Gold" <heg2001@med.cornell.edu>]

If you have some knowledge or information about what increment poses a 
clinically meaningful threshold, that could be used as a cutpoint (e.g., 
every half point has an impact on a person's health somehow, and so you 
create categories such as -1.5-(-1), -1-(-.5), -.5-0, 0-.5, .5-1). Another 
option is to create "automatically determined" categories such as tertiles 
but that is arbitrary, so you might want to create, say, tertiles and 
quartiles and test if creating the categories in that manner makes a 
difference.

At 10:42 AM 6/16/2004, you wrote:

> I have a discrete variable (health status)  which takes value from -1.6 to 
> 1. The data consists of pre and post values of the variable. I want to 
> categorize the variable in  3-7 categories in order to study the movement 
> between categories . How can I do this? What Criteria should I use to 
> determine the best categorization, in terms of 1. number of categories 
> and, 2. cutoffs. Please respond.
> Samir
>
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/