This is my first posting to Statalist, so I ask for forgiveness in any breaks in protocol.
I have a dataset of about 300 observations and I am going to separate them into 4 groups -- not totally equal in size but based on certain characteristics. I want the four groups to all have similar distributions along a certain metric (i.e., cost) -- so the mean, median, SD, etc., are similar, so I want to sample observations from each group. I'll choose one of the four groups as my baseline (probably the one with smallest range or the fewest number of observations - but I'm open to any suggestions about that as well).
What's the best approach for doing this? I suspect this question has been addressed numerous times in various places, so being pointed in the right direction is sufficient. Note: we still have Stata 9.2, so nothing too fancy.
Thank you!
Kate
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