Re: st: Identify Categorical/Dichotomous and Continuous Variables

[John Antonakis <John.Antonakis@unil.ch>]

Welcome to STATA....you will not regret making the jump from SPSS (and 
it is a rather large one--i.e., that you will have a large benefit).

The type of variable you have matters mostly for when the variable is a 
dependent variable--and STATA will recognize the variable you have 
depending on the analysis (for e.g., for a probit, you should have only 
binary data....for an ordered probit, ordinal data...etc).. For all 
analysis, STATA can easily hand continuous or categorical variables as 
independent variables. When variables are not continuous, you can leave 
them as categories and then use the xi: command. For example,

xi: reg y x i.cat

....will create a series of k-1 dummy variables for the variable (to 
control for the fixed effect). Type help xi to see how useful xi is.

This is a very powerful and flexible approach to modeling.

Best,
J.

____________________________________________________

Prof. John Antonakis
Associate Dean 
Faculty of Business and Economics
University of Lausanne
Internef #618
CH-1015 Lausanne-Dorigny
Switzerland

Tel ++41 (0)21 692-3438
Fax ++41 (0)21 692-3305

http://www.hec.unil.ch/people/jantonakis&cl=en
____________________________________________________



Svend Juul wrote:

> Frank wrote:
>  
> I am new to Stata: moved from SPSS a week ago. I am hoping 
> that someone can help me with what I imagine is a simple 
> issue. I saved an SPSS file as a Stata one. I am working 
> my way through the user guide and the data management 
> manual, but I am having difficulty with confirming whether 
> Stata recognizes variables as continuous (or scale) or 
> categorical/dichotomous (or nominal). In SPSS, you can 
> easily identify whether the type of measure is a scale, 
> nominal, or string with its drop down menu in the variable 
> view. It would be a great help, and I would appreciate it 
> very much if someone would tell me the method to confirm 
> the data type for categorical/dichotomous and for 
> continuous variables? Thank you.
>  
> ======================================================
>  
> As Martin responded: Stata has no formal distinction between
> continuous and categorical numeric variables. However, the
> command
>  
>     codebook, compact
>  
> may tell you what you want. The -Unique- column tells you
> how many "unique" (meaning different) values each variable 
> has.
>  
> Hope this helps
> Svend
>  
> ________________________________________________________ 
>  
> Svend Juul
> Institut for Folkesundhed, Afdeling for Epidemiologi
> (Institute of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology)
> Vennelyst Boulevard 6 
> DK-8000 Aarhus C,  Denmark 
> Phone, work:   +45 8942 6090 
> Phone, home:   +45 8693 7796 
> Fax:           +45 8613 1580 
> E-mail:        sj@soci.au.dk 
> _________________________________________________________ 
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>   
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/