At 11:11 PM 2/2/2010, Jet wrote:
Hi, all,
My variable is measured by likert scales, and there are a few
missing values. I am thinking of using mean, mode or median to
substitute the missing values. Which is better given the ordinal
nature of the measurement?
The multiple imputation procedures in Stata 11 allow you to impute
values for ordinal variables.
Consider too what you are going to do with this variable once you
have got it. If you are going to use it as the dependent variable in
an ologit analysis, that rules out using the mean. If you are going
to use it as an independent variable, do you plan on treating it as
continuous? If so, you wouldn't be the first person in the world to
do so and plugging in a mean or an imputed regression estimate
becomes more reasonable.
-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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WWW: http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
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