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Re: AW: st: imputing continuous values when respondents select categories, e.g., income category


From   Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To   "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject   Re: AW: st: imputing continuous values when respondents select categories, e.g., income category
Date   Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:09:40 -0500

At 03:29 PM 4/24/2009, Alan Acock wrote:
Thanks for recommending intreg. I was not familiar with this command. When I run the example in the reference manual, the estimated income is not always within the limits of the interval the respondent selected. Using their example and predicting est_income, here are the first 10 observations:
  +---------------------------+
     | wage1   wage2    est_wage |
     |---------------------------|
  1. |     .       5    4.266946 |
  2. |     5      10    7.502522 |
  3. |     5      10    10.19239 |
  4. |    10      15    8.924339 |
  5. |     .       5    8.116896 |
     |---------------------------|
  6. |     .       5     10.2202 |
  7. |     .       5    10.35355 |
  8. |     5      10   -2.894233 |
  9. |     5      10    13.32243 |
 10. |     5      10    9.792462 |

Some estimated values are well outside of the interval. Is it recommended to simply replace these with the interval boundaries?

There is nothing that says the estimated wages have to lie within the interval. The est_wage is just E(Y | X). Just as in regular regression, the estimates will sometimes be higher than the observed value, sometimes lower. My guess is that replacing them with the interval boundaries would be a terrible idea.

The intreg approach might be good if income was your dependent variable, but by the way you are talking I'm guessing you really want it as an independent variable.

Sometimes people just use the midpoint of the interval; other times they will just break income up into dummy variables. I believe there are other more advanced methods but I am not that familiar with them.


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
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