Notice: On April 23, 2014, Statalist moved from an email list to a forum, based at statalist.org.
From | "Michael I. Lichter" <mlichter@buffalo.edu> |
To | statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu |
Subject | Re: st: pweight question |
Date | Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:03:45 -0400 |
Steve,That does sound like a pweight, and if you know nothing else about the survey, you should treat it as a pweight.
The scale of the weights (what they sum to) doesn't tell you whether or not they are pweights. Scaling the variables to sum to the size of the sample is something you do when you expect to use a package (or command) that, like SPSS until recently, only accepts fweights.
Do you have any additional information about the design of the study? Are there any design variables (strata, clustering variables) in the dataset?
-ml Steven Archambault wrote:
Hi all, I have some meta data from a survey that says "A weight was calculated based on the probability that the observation would be included in the sample." It sounds like a probability weight. However, when I add up all of the values in the corresponding weights column in the data, the total is equal to the total number of observations. So, it seems like these weights are more about how the observations are represented in the sample. Does anybody have a suggestion as to what I should do with this weight data? These are households in a cross country survey. Thanks, Steve * * 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/
-- Michael I. Lichter, Ph.D. <mlichter@buffalo.edu> Research Assistant Professor & NRSA Fellow UB Department of Family Medicine / Primary Care Research Institute UB Clinical Center, 462 Grider Street, Buffalo, NY 14215 Office: CC 126 / Phone: 716-898-4751 / FAX: 716-898-3536 * * 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/