Re: st: imputing continuous values when respondents select categories, e.g., income category

[Alan Acock <acock@mac.com>]

Richard Williams asked if I want to impute missing values or to plug in values within each interval, as opposed to assigning everybody the midpoint of the interval they select. 

The latter is what I want to do and it appears that the intreg command with the ystar(a,b) option in the post estimation commands is exactly what I should use. This treats income as the dependent variable, but once we estimate the value we can use that as an independent variable in other models. At least this is my understanding.

--Alan Acock

On Apr 24, 2009, at 5:22 AM, Richard Williams wrote:

At 05:33 PM 4/23/2009, Alan Acock wrote:

This is a question for an econometrician or anybody else who has a good way to estimate a continuous value for income when respondents select a category, such as 0-5000, 5001 - 9999, 10000 - 25,000, etc. Note categories

Alan, can you clarify the question a bit?  Do you mean

(a) you want to impute values when income is missing
(b) data are not missing but you want to substitute a value within the given range, e.g. if they are in the range 0-5000 you want to plug in values like 3289, 4163, etc.

Also, is income a dependent or independent variable?  If dependent, you might consider intreg.

I think the variety of answers so far reflects the fact that different people have interpreted your question differently.


-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME:   (574)289-5227
EMAIL:  Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.Edu
WWW:    http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/