I don't know any general rule from demography
or medicine. My wild guess based on no evidence
whatsoever is that demographic or medical expertise
wouldn't help here anyway. That is, if you
have information on order of birth, it should be
used; if you don't, there is no magic that will
make up for that lack.
Other things being equal, what would drive my
analysis if this were my problem is knowing that
statistical techniques that feed on ranks as ranks
presume that (apparently) equal values are assigned
equal ranks and that the sum of the ranks is preserved.
This is the default of -egen, rank()- anyway.
That doesn't mean that ties don't need corrections
for some kinds of nonparametric tests
that may or may not be offered by the programs you
use.
There is an argument for using -egen, rank() unique-
if you want to shake data points apart on some kinds of
graphs, but unless you have a very small dataset this is
probably not an issue.
Nick
[email protected]
Kemal Aslan
> I have information on the age of children, but for twins and
> triples I do
> not have information on who comes the first tothe world. I want to use
> egen-rank to create to a birth order for each child. Given
> the incomplete
> information set, which option of egen-rank should I use? Do
> you know the
> general rule to create birth order when the information is
> incomplete as
> described above in the demography and medicine literature?
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