Ana is correct. You must use pweights. If you use -fweights-
(frequency weights) , Stata will think that your sample size is 7
million, not 500. This, by the way is how SPSS treats weighted data,
and, by doing so, makes p-values and standard errors unusuable. This
is the cost of "simplicity" that Martin wondered about.
A hallmark of weights is that they sum to the population size, so they
should be large numbers, possibly fractional. You can check the
weights by:
egen tot_wt= total(weight_var)
list tot_wt in 1
Who weighted the data? If it is a professional survey organization
they should have documented the sampling design. Th e designmight have
included sampling strata and clusters of telephone exchanges,. If so,
use Stata's -svyset- command to indicate the design and use the -svy-
programs to analyze the data. If there were clusters and you do not
account for them, your standard errors will probably be incorrect.
-Steve
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 4:14 AM, Ana Gabriela Guerrero Serdan
<[email protected]> wrote:
> You probably need to use pweight, here is a link that explains the difference between fw, pw and aw:
>
> http://www.cpc.unc.edu/services/computer/presentations/statatutorial/example30.html
>
>> regards,
> Gaby
>
>
>
> --- On Fri, 5/15/09, Charles Man@CCR <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> From: Charles Man@CCR <[email protected]>
>> Subject: st: PWEIGHT question
>> To: [email protected]
>> Date: Friday, May 15, 2009, 1:50 AM
>>> I have a small telephone survey dataset of 500 cases which
>> were randomly drawn
>> from a population of 7 million people. The dataset was
>> weighted according to
>> income and sex distributions of the population. In Stata,
>> do I need to include
>> [pw=weight] in all analyses? In SPSS, people simply choose
>> WEIGHT BY and don’t
>> have to be concerned about the weight type. However, in
>> Stata, we have to
>> determine which weight type is appropriate. Is it Pweight
>> or Fweight useful in
>> my situation? Which one is the most appropriate?
>>
*
* 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/
