Hi all,
I got some useful hints on my last posting of this question (detailed
problem description attached below) but since at that time i hadn't
learned programming, I just manually entered the top 3 concerns after
generating village-level counts using -mrtab-.
The trouble is that the data has changed since then, finally
convincing me to learn Stata programming! However, having experience
with the C++ way of doing things i find it hard to grasp how one could
do this without using arrays.
The problem essentially is that I have three lists of count data
(corresponding to the values taken by 3 sets of variables - c1-c6,
d1-d6, e1-e6). For each observation in the data, I want to sort c1-c6
according to size and pick three variables with the highest count. I
need to refer to the values stored in d1-d6 (and to e1-e6, if needed)
_only_ if i need to break any ties in the ranking of c1-c6.
So, for instance, if the values taken by the variables (generated by
-mrtab-) are as follows:
Obs # c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 d1 d2 d3 d4 d5 d6 e1 e2 e3 e4 e5 e6
21. 1 0 6 2 3 3 0 0 2 1 2 2
0 0 1 0 0 1
So in this case we see that based on c1-c6 we can sort (3, 5, 6, ...)
but we need to break the tie between option 5 and 6 since both are
three. We then look at d5 and d6, but they are also tied both with
value 2. So then we look at e5 and e6, and choose 6 as the second
highest ranked option as compared to 5 (in case we can't even break
the tie in the e-list; I just assign ranks randomly). Note that the
variables were generated in such a way that, for all n, c1>=d1>=e1.
So for observation 21, the top 3 concerns based on the above data would 3, 6, 5.
I am clueless on how to do this in Stata.
Any help, general comments or specific suggestions, will be much appreciated!
farooq
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Farooq Naseer <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 00:55:17 -0500
Subject: Finding 3 most popular responses to a question
To: [email protected]
Dear all,
A randomly selected group of people within some survey villages were given the
option to pick their top three every-day concerns: Of the six coded
options available, a respondent could pick, say, (4,4,2) and another
one in the same village could pick (1,6,5). (Duplicates like 4,4,..
occur due to the fact that the responses were post-coded into six
broad categories to make analysis simpler).
Now i want to get a measure for the community's top three priorities
by aggregating the information contained in the above individual
responses.
I have the above info in a stata dataset as variables:
concern1-concern3. To avoid complications re. appropriate weighing
scheme, for the time being, I just want to take an unweighted count of
the values in these 3 variables for each village -- the variable VID
-- in my sample. In case there is a tie, for instance a village 'j'
has 20 responses each for values 4 and 6, I want to pick the value
which gets mentioned more in a higher-priority variable acc. to the
following priority ranking: concern1 > concern2 > concern3.
<snip>...
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