RE: st: Missingness

[Brendan Churchill <Brendan.Churchill@utas.edu.au>]

sorry I wasn't very clear

I have ordinal measures on a Likert scale 1-7 as my dependent variables, which I am treating as interval for the purposes of analysis. There are some negative values on these measures which indicate that a respondent either gave more than one answer on the measure or did not complete this section of the survey. I usually recode these as missing =. 

I don't think I should treat them as zero because wouldn't' that affect my interpretation of the dependent variable? 

Thanks for the response 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu [mailto:owner-statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Cox
Sent: Tuesday, 28 August 2012 6:07 PM
To: statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: st: Missingness

Your strategy isn't clear. Regardless of whether or how you use an extra missingness variable, how do you expect Stata to treat the missing values in the variables you already have?  Also, are the ordinal predictors being treated as ordinal? Is the response ordinal and does it include missing values too? One way forward is to treat "missing" as just another category with its own code, but that would seem to oblige you to treat such variables as nominal (in practice as equivalent indicator variables) -- unless somehow you know that "missing" always means "very big" or "very small" or "zero" and so can be placed or one end or within the order.

Nick

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 8:42 AM, Brendan Churchill <Brendan.Churchill@utas.edu.au> wrote:

> I am using some ordinal variables, which have some numeric missing values, in a multilevel model. In some previous research, I have seen researchers include a 'Missing' independent variable in their model to account for some of the 'missingness' - or rather to control for the missing values, but I don't quite understand how to do it in Stata or even if that's a good way to do it. I've tried to make a binary variable in which the missing values are coded 1 and the rest of the values are coded 0 but the model rejects this because it's collinear.
>
> Is this how you do it? Or is there a variable for the entire data set that is created to account for all missing variables?
>
> I'd great appreciate any advice or assistance anyone out there could 
> provide

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