st: how to analyze ideology data

[Smaranda Draghia <sdraghia@hotmail.com>]

Hello,

I am working on a project where survey respondents were asked 12 political ideology-related questions. (For example, one of these had to do with how strongly a respondent favors or opposes gay marriage.) All of these have answers on a 5-point scale from strongly favor to strongly oppose. I am looking to find a systematic way of determining each respondent's political ideology based on the answers to these questions. What would be the best way to do that using stata?

(It was suggested that I should create two dummy variables for each question. One dummy variable would have 1=liberal and 0=not liberal, and the other would have 1=conservative and 0=not conservative. Then I could subtract the total number of "liberal" 1s from the total number of "conservative" 1s for each respondent. The more positive the result, the more conservative the ideology. Is this the best way to go about doing something like this? Is there a way to make the analysis more accurate? Also, what would be the best tests of significance for this kind of analysis?)

Thank you,

Smaranda Draghia 		 	   		  
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