Re: st: summary statistics

[Donald Spady <dspady@ualberta.ca>]

Thanks to both of you for your comments and alternative approaches.  I liked the original in that it does not destroy the data, as collapse would do, however, it is nice to know there are several possible ways of getting what I want.  Nick is also correct in that I am not overly fluent in Stata; I have used it for several years, and am comfortable in general, but only with the basics and what I use on a regular basis.

Don
   
On 2012-10-01, at 10:33 AM, Nick Cox <njcoxstata@gmail.com> wrote:

> Actually, I pointed to _two_ user-written commands that do this.
> 
> In general, I agree with Clyde. The trade-off between doing it
> yourself from first principles and finding a suitable user-written
> command (or even an official one) is delicate, and always with a user.
> However, the success of Clyde's approach depends partly on his being
> an experienced user who is fluent in, and feels comfortable with, much
> of Stata.
> 
> With a structure this simple, a two-line solution is also competitive.
> 
> stack HSS*, into(HSS) clear
> tab _stack HSS
> 
> -- although that loses some detail on variable names and labels, and
> so does not qualify as a good solution by itself.
> 
> However, the full trade-off needs to take account of various awkward facts:
> 
> 1. You might want to do this repeatedly.
> 
> 2. You might (almost certainly will) want to go back to your original
> data structure.
> 
> 3. You might want to carry weights through the -reshape- too.
> 
> As said, I am in agreement, just spelling out some issues.
> 
> Nick
> 
> On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 5:14 PM, Clyde B Schechter
> <clyde.schechter@einstein.yu.edu> wrote:
>> Don Spady was looking for a command that would take variables HSS1-HSS18, each with a discrete 1 to 5 response set and create a table like:
>> 
>>                Col 1    Col2     Col 3    Col 4   Col5
>> HSS1        n1            n2            n3             n4           n5
>> HSS2        n1            n2            n3             n4           n5
>> HSS3
>> 
>> And Nick Cox pointed him to a user-written command that does this.
>> 
>> I would just add that this can also be easily done using a few built-in Stata commands:
>> 
>> (I assume there is another variable, called id, which identifies the observations.  If not, it can be generated first)
>> 
>> reshape long HSS, i(id) j(varnum)
>> collapse (count) Col = id, by(varnum HSS)
>> reshape wide Col, i(varnum) j(HSS)
>> gen variable= "HSS"+string(varnum)
>> list variable Col*, noobs clean
>> 
>> 
>> I suppose it is a matter of taste which way to do these things.  In general, if it is something I do repeatedly, I find the convenience of a single command (which I might write an ado file for myself) worthwhile.  But if it's a one-off, it's generally faster to write a few lines of code and also not later be bothered with trying to remember what some unfamiliar command name means.
> 
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Donald Spady

--
dspady@ualberta.ca





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