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From | "Polloni Stefano" <stefano.polloni@umontreal.ca> |
To | <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu> |
Subject | st: Computing Quintiles with frequency weight |
Date | Thu, 4 Aug 2011 22:49:47 -0400 |
Greetings, I am trying to observe comsumption patterns among the different income quintiles of a population. My sample contains 10 801 observations, each with a corresponding frequency weight so as to be representative of the whole population (about 30 million people). I am using this command to compute my quintiles: xtile quintile= hhinctot[fw=weight], n(5) (hhinctot as the income variable) After doublechecking, I realized that some of my quintiles contained substantially less or more than 20% of the observations (while effectively taking in consideration the frequency weight - i.e. as if I duplicated myself the observations according to their frequency) this is the result I get: Quintile 1: 20,406% Quintile 2: 20,552% Quintile 3: 19,239% Quintile 4: 22,323% Quintile 5: 17,479% I can get more precise results by computing the quintile myself "manually", any idea why stata gets this far from 20% ? Thank you for your time! * * 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/