Beginners question: Counting observations

[Vanter Birad]

Hello together,

I imported an MS Excel file into Stata and already run into issues. I used "encode" to convert the variable into "long" storage type. The variable has 239 different characteristics. For example the value 1 is assigned to the characteristis "a", 2 to "b" etc.

My problem is now, that i want to list minimum, maximum and median numbers. However Stata will present me when using "sum" with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 239, median is 120, which is just a categorial number but does not have any real information on how often "a" as such appears in a company or so.

I hope that was understandable, unfortunately English is neither my first or second language!

Thanks for the help!

[Nick Cox]

Using encode means that your variable was entered as string with values like "a", "b", etc. The numerical representation "a" -> 1, "b" -> 2, etc. is essentially a matter of convenience for those Stata commands that don't work with string variables.

That aside, what you want are the frequencies of your categorical variable, which you can get from the string version too. tabulate will do this; note particularly the sort option.

summarize, if that is what you used, is not useful to you.

(Telling us exactly what commands you used never hurts.)

[Vanter Birad]

Yes, i used encode because i use this variable to distinguish during my regression and other parts, therefore i needed numbers that i can use in my commands. "sort" helps in some way, as i now can see how often a special characteristic appeared.

The variable lists form of ilnesses of employees per company. So e.g. 1 is: flue, 2 is: cold etc. I have however a variable that lists all companies in numbers, so i can distuingish towards companies.

I now want to see what the minimum amount of different diseases is, the median and the maximum. Furthermore I want to see this per company, but as I said this will not work when the variable is numerically represented.... I am a bit helpless

[Roberto Ferrer]

I now want to see what the minimum amount of different diseases is

Maybe Vanter Birad wants something related to:

http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...other-variable

[Vanter Birad]

Maybe Vanter Birad wants something related to:

http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...other-variable

I tried this but unfortunately does not work...

[Vanter Birad]

I stand corrected: changing the varlist helped and gave me perfect results using egen command!! Thanks!! (still have no idea what it does, but whatever )