Re: st: RE: Outputs as inputs - how to efficiently process a series of routines?

[Philip Burgess <philip.burgess.uq@gmail.com>]

Brilliant - thanks Nick.

Need to do some more checking with the outputs but I think this -
statsby - is exactly what I need....

Philip

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> -statsby- is your friend. See the manual entry in [D] and also
>
> SJ-10-1 gr0045  . . . . . . . . . . . . . Speaking Stata: The statsby strategy
>        . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  N. J. Cox
>        Q1/10   SJ 10(1):143--151                                (no commands)
>        demonstrates the use of statsby to prepare a reduced
>        dataset for subsequent graphing
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> Philip Burgess
>
> This is a data management question rather than a statistical issue....
>
> I have a dataset which is stratified by 4 variables:
>
> 1. Sample - kids, adults, or older persons;
> 2. Year - 2006, 2007, 2008 or 2009;
> 3. Treatment setting - inpatient, residential or ambulatory;
> 4. Status - baseline, follow-up or change.
>
> Thus, the overall structure is a 3 x 4 x 3 x 3 = 108 unique strata.
>
> The outcome variable is usually a summary score and I need to estimate
> various statistics (say mean, SD, percentiles) for each of the strata;
> and I also need to estimate the internal consistency of the outcome
> measure with Cronbach's Alpha.
>
> I need to use the estimated statistic(s) as 'input' in a variety of
> other calculations (e.g., calculate overall Effect Size using the
> mean, the SD; other calculations require Alpha).
>
> I know these statistics are available immediately after execution - I
> can get these using the command - return list - . After that, I can
> generate a new variable - gen double alpha = r(alpha)- and then run -
> collapse (first) alpha - to get the required statistic(s).
>
> The problem is that I have 108 strata and whereas I can 'manually'
> code each of these variants (and save as temp files, then - append -
> all 108 to save a single file - this is both inefficient and the risk
> of error (i.e., me!) is high.
>
> Is there a way around this?
>
> I should add that I have mainly used SPSS for these kinds of data
> management issues. Theoretically, using SPSS commands that 'split' the
> data file by the required partitions and then using its Output
> Management System will achieve the required output. This used to work
> with earlier versions but not the current release - hence my efforts
> with Stata.
>
>
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