Re: st: converting multiple choice (string) response options to numeric values

[Ronnie Babigumira <rb.glists@gmail.com>]

encode worked just fine. What you see as the "exact same variable" is
just the label

*****
clear *
input id str1 qn1 str1 strqn3
1 A D
2 A A
3 E B
4 B C
end

encode qn1, g(nqn1)
list
list, nolabel
*****

Ps: note the label option of encode which allows you to provide your own label

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 1:59 AM, Katherine Picho <thestatsbabe@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a huge dataset which has test data with multiple choice
> questions. 2 questions have choices A -E,  and the rest have 4 options
> A-D
>
> I was looking to convert these options to numeric values with A
> corresponding to 1, B=2, etc.
>
> I'm using stata 12.
>
> I tried using the egen newvar= group (oldvar) command, it seems to
> work for some questions but not others. For instance the sequence of
> the 1st 5 students' answers for question 18 are  AAAAA, which should
> translate to 5 consecutive 1s..but I get consecutive 2s instead.
>
> For another test question 10, a value of 6 is reported for one
> observation which actually has a letter value of C which should
> correspond to a value of 3.
>
> I also tried encode oldvar, gen (newvar)
> but I get the exact same variable data as in the original (i.e.
> letters, not numbers) even though the data storage type now shows
> 'long'
>
> I've checked to make sure there is consistency in data entry and there
> appears to be; i.e. all responses are entered in capital letters, and
> there is no mix of numeric and letters in the same variable/ column.
>
> What am I doing wrong? Any thoughts on this problem would be highly
> welcome as I dread the idea of having to manually convert these
> letters to numbers!
>
> thanks!
>
> Katherine
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