Changing from a byte to a numeric variable

[Angus Greaves]

Hi, I am a new user of Stata and would appreciate any help I can get

I have a varible called v719

it is a response to the question "whether respondent works for family member, someone else or is self-employed"

the possible values are for family member, self-employed, for someone else

i want to convert all reponses that are not for family member to 1 and all response for a family member to 0

However when i tried to do this i got an error- (see below)

How do I convert these values into the numeric form?

I am using Stata/MP 17.0

generate employment=0

. replace employment=1 if v719=="self-employed"
type mismatch
r(109);

. replace employment=1 if v719==self-employed
self not found
r(111);

. describe v719

Variable Storage Display Value
name type format label Variable label
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
v719 byte %8.0g V719 respondent works for family, others, self

[Angus Greaves]

nevermind i figured it out, the summerize command told me there were 3 numbers

sadly the documentation for the data doesn't seem to say which number is which but that's my problem

also when you view the data it shows the words not numbers for v719

[William Lisowski]

The output of the describe command tells you that the variable named v719 (lower-case v) has a value label V719 (upper-case V). So when you view the data you are looking at the value labels and not the numeric values. The output of

help label

tells you that

label list V719

will show you the definition of the value lable, so you know which value corresponds to which label.

If you're looking at a variable that you don't fully understand, as in this case, the codebook command will help more than the simple summarize or describe command. Perhaps the source of your data expected that users would start by creating a codebook for the dataset, and that is why the documentation doesn't tell you which number is which.

codebook v719

or to get a codebook for all the variables

codebook

but do look at the output of

help codebook

to learn about the options that can be used with it.