Re: st: My stata won't -tab- with my value labels - why?

[Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com>]

Two points:

First,

label define 0 "male" 1 "female"

won't work. You probably meant to type something like

label define fem 0 "male" 1 "female"

Second, what you're not getting is that defining labels is just one of
two steps. You must explicitly link them to the variable you want by
something like

label val fem fem

Even if the value labels have the same name as a variable, that means nothing.

There isn't a one-to-one association between variables and value
labels. The same value labels could be used for different variables.

This is all exemplified in the help.


On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 10:56 PM, Brandon Olszewski
<olszewski.brandon@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all:
> I'm frustrated because I can't get -tab- output with the value labels,
> but instead, only their numeric codes. Here's a simplified example...
> Let's say I've got the var <female> coded as 0 and 1.
> .
> label define 0 "male" 1 "female"
> tab fem, sort mis
>
> ...produces -tab- output that doesn't include the labels "male" and
> "female", but instead, 0 & 1. I want a labeled table of frequencies
> (sorted, and showing missing observations, in this case) so that I
> don't have to manually insert the labels.
> Clearly with this example it doesn't matter too much. But with the
> dataset I've got, it is consequential.
> This should be simple. Can anyone help me understand what I'm doing
> wrong, and how to fix it?
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