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Re: st: dealing with multiple alphanumeric responses


From   [email protected] (William Gould)
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: dealing with multiple alphanumeric responses
Date   Tue, 02 Jul 2002 08:25:36 -0500

Pooja Gupta <[email protected]> wrote, 

> I am doing quantitative analyses of a set of variables using stata. one of
> my variables has multiple alphanumeric characters that are not seperated by
> commas.  for eg, the first five observations of the variable are
>
>       1. ABC
>       2. ABCEG
>       3. BDEGHI
>       4. ACDFGI
>       5. AHI
>
> can a write a code which allows me to do a tabulation of each of these
> alphabets (i.e., how many As, how many B, how many C and so on) ?

Tom Steichen <[email protected]> has supplied one answer and that may be 
exactly what Pooja wants.

Alternatively, perhaps Pooja would obtain what he wants if he had a dataset in
which the first three obsrvations were "A", "B", and "C", the next five
observations "A", "B", "C", "E", "G", and so on.  Then Pooja could just type
-tabulate response-.

Let us assume that the variable containing "ABC", "ABCEG", ..., in Pooja's
current data is called answers.   We will also assume that Pooja has 
a variable named id in the dataset which uniquely identifies the observations.


Step 1:  determine maximum length of answers
--------------------------------------------

        . gen length = length(answers)
        . summarize length

I will assume that the maximum value of length is 9 in what follows.


Step 2:  Turn variable answers into nine variables, response1 -- response9
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

        . forvalues i=1(1)9 {
        .        gen str1 response`i' = substr(answer, `i', 1)
        . }


Step 3:  Convert data from wide form to long
--------------------------------------------

        . reshape long response, i(id)


Step 4:  Perform tabulation
---------------------------

        . tabulate response

-- Bill
[email protected]
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