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Re: st: converting string to numerals


From   Nick Cox <[email protected]>
To   "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject   Re: st: converting string to numerals
Date   Wed, 20 Nov 2013 19:15:32 +0000

-encode- does not understand English in the way that you do. My guess
is that it did not encode your values randomly at all, but as

1 agree
2 disagree
3 neither ...
4 strongly agree
5 strongly disagree

which is an alphabetical order.

What you need is covered by the syntax and documentation of -encode-,
namely to define your labels in advance:

label define mylabels -2 "strongly disagree"  <and so forth>
encode var, gen(var1) label(mylabels)

while at the same time using more evocative variable names.

Nick
[email protected]


On 20 November 2013 19:07, ramesh <[email protected]> wrote:

 I have a very basic question about coding string variables. My variable is
> expressed as strongly disagree, disagree, neither disagree nor agree, agree,
> and strongly agree. I want to code them -2 if strongly disagree, -1 if
> disagree, 0 if neither disagree nor agree, 1 if agree, and 2 if strongly
> agree. I used encode(var), gen(var1), but it coded the scales randomly. Is
> there any direct way to preserve the order in data coding?
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