Re: st: programming question for instrument scoring with weights

[Austin Nichols <austinnichols@gmail.com>]

Stas; Marguerite <mbaty1@son.jhmi.edu>:
I think the -egen- "function" below is meant to be rowtotal(), not
total().  But beware of missing values counting as zeros in such a
formulation.

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com> wrote:
...
> I am assuming that your items are coded 1 for yes, 0 for no. Or you
> can do this sequentially:
>
> egen int total_score = total( item1 item2 [fill in the dots] item19 )
> replace total_score = total_score + 4 if item2 == 1
> ...
> replace total_score = total_score - 3 if item3a == 1
>
> All of these ways are cumbersome, and the more lines of code you have,
> the more likely it is you will have an error somewhere. The choice
> between different ways of coding your problem is a matter of
> aesthetics, and how readable the code will be to you and other users
> of it.
...
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