st: Ordered response threshold values overlap

[Christine Kalenborn <christine.kalenborn@tu-dresden.de>]

Dear STATA users,

I am looking at the determinants of life satisfaction. As the dependent 
variable is of ordinal scale (1 "dissatisfied" to 10 "satisfied"), I use 
an ordered response model.
When I compute the regression results, the cutpoints strongly overlap.
Example:
       /cut1 |  -3.292553   2.309304 -7.818706    1.233599
       /cut2 |  -3.021334    2.30325 -7.535621    1.492953
       /cut3 |  -2.631861   2.296314 -7.132554    1.868832
       /cut4 |  -2.330351   2.291877 -6.822349    2.161646
       /cut5 |  -1.791179   2.291642 -6.282714    2.700356
       /cut6 |  -1.413765   2.285604 -5.893467    3.065937
       /cut7 |  -.9014434   2.286238 -5.382388    3.579501
       /cut8 |  -.1529157   2.264794 -4.591831       4.286
       /cut9 |   .4205266   2.252341 -3.993981    4.835034

I interpreted this as a sign for the missing difference between the 
threshold values. In addition to that I calculated the test of equality 
of cut off values:

 ( 1)  [cut1]_cons - [cut2]_cons = 0
 ( 2)  [cut1]_cons - [cut3]_cons = 0
 ( 3)  [cut1]_cons - [cut4]_cons = 0
 ( 4)  [cut1]_cons - [cut5]_cons = 0
 ( 5)  [cut1]_cons - [cut6]_cons = 0
 ( 6)  [cut1]_cons - [cut7]_cons = 0
 ( 7)  [cut1]_cons - [cut8]_cons = 0
 ( 8)  [cut1]_cons - [cut9]_cons = 0

           chi2(  8) = 5817.80
         Prob > chi2 =    0.0000

The null hypothesis is highly rejected which leads to the conclusion 
that the thresholds are different.
Should I rescale the life satisfaction values to avoid overlapping cut 
points or is this not necessary? I hope anybody can help me.

Thank you! Best wishes


Christine Kalenborn

--
..........................................................
Dipl. Volkswirtin Christine Kalenborn
 
Chair of Economics, esp. Macroeconomics,
Spatial Economics and Regional Science
Institute of Transport & Economics
Faculty of Traffic Sciences "Friedrich List"
Technische Universität Dresden
D-01062 Dresden
Germany
 
Würzburger Str. 35
Room 009
 
Phone: +49-351-463-36806
Fax:     +49-351-463-36819
 
http://tu-dresden.de/die_tu_dresden/fakultaeten/vkw/iwv/vwl/index_html

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