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| Title | Ordering the results of a tabulation of a string variable | |
| Author | William Gould, StataCorp |
Someone has a string variable containing
MC = most competitive
HC = highly competitive
VC = Very competitive
C = Competitive
LC = Less Competitive
NC = Non-Competitive
If you tabulate the string variable, the results are presented in alphabetical order:
. tabulate comp
comp | Freq. Percent Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
C | 41 20.50 20.50
HC | 35 17.50 38.00
LC | 27 13.50 51.50
MC | 34 17.00 68.50
NC | 34 17.00 85.50
VC | 29 14.50 100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
Total | 200 100.00
Here is how you order the variables:
. label define order 1 MC 2 HC 3 VC 4 C 5 LC 6 NC . encode comp, gen(c2) label(order)
That is, encode will use a predefined value label if you tell it to do that. Now when I tabulate new variable c2, I get the results ordered from high to low:
. tabulate c2
c2 | Freq. Percent Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
MC | 34 17.00 17.00
HC | 35 17.50 34.50
VC | 29 14.50 49.00
C | 41 20.50 69.50
LC | 27 13.50 83.00
NC | 34 17.00 100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
Total | 200 100.00
If I wanted them ordered from low to high, I would just define my numeric coding differently before encode:
. label define order2 1 NC 2 LC 3 C 4 VC 5 HC 6 MC
. encode comp, gen(c3) label(order2)
. tab c3
c3 | Freq. Percent Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
NC | 34 17.00 17.00
LC | 27 13.50 30.50
C | 41 20.50 51.00
VC | 29 14.50 65.50
HC | 35 17.50 83.00
MC | 34 17.00 100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
Total | 200 100.00
