Hi statalist,
I have a dependent variable (a score) which is ordinal in character.
However, it has around 30 or so categories the value of which are
continuous ranging anywhere from 0 to 50. There could be values like
3.5, 3.6, 4.2 etc. My questions are:
1) Is Ologit the right estimation method for this type of decision
variables? ( I should say that I am not particularly interested in
analyzing each cutpoints. I am only interested in how the changes in
explanatory variables affect the over all score. I dont expect OLS to
return good results because the dep var is both bounded and ordinal in
character.
2) Given that ologit is the right method, how does stata treat the
values in my score variable while estimating? Does it round off the
scores into whole numbers before estimating or does it treat them as
they are. If it rounds off obviously 3.5 score and 3.6 score will be
treated same. Stata description on it tells me "The actual values
taken on by the dependent variable are irrelevant, except that larger
values are assumed to correspond to "higher" outcomes." My estimation
gives me as many coefficients for cut-points as there are categories,
which makes me assume that it must not be rounding those numbers. Can
someone clarify?
Thanks.
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