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Stata Hand-out for Module 4
Helpful tips
1. Creating a variable involves the “generate” or “gen” command. For example, “gen educ=.”
tells Stata to create a variable called “educ” and to make it numeric (the “.” tells Stata this).
See the extra material at the end of this module for more about generating variables
2. If you don’t want to keep the variable you created, you can delete it by typing “drop” and
then the variable name. For example, “drop educ” tells Stata to drop the variable above.
3. If you have a really long tedious command, like a graphic with 6 overlaid plots, you will
probably NOT want to use the graphics interface because typing the commands is faster once
you know what they are. Even better, you will probably want to copy and paste commands
so you don’t have to keep retyping the same ones. Sometimes it will help to put the
command in a text file (using WordPad or NotePad) and using the search and replace
function.
4. Some of the graphics commands are complicated in Stata. Don’t worry about this because
graphics are really not the point of the class!
Tables similar to those created in the slides can be made easily in Stata. To take an example that is
not in the lecture notes, if you open the dataset “Chile” you can make a table using two categorical
variables, “region” and “oil”. I’m choosing these to show you simply because they are categorical
variables; this is not theory-driven. You can simply write “tab educ vote” to get a simple table. You
can choose to get the row percentages, column percentages, and/or cell percentages by writing
“row”, “col”, “cell” (or all three “row col cell”) after a comma. For example, to get row percentages:
From the dataset “Chile”
. tab educ vote, row
+----------------+
| Key |
|----------------|
| frequency |
| row percentage |
+----------------+
| vote
education | A N NA U Y | Total
-----------+-------------------------------------------------------+----------
1 | 0 0 0 1 0 | 1
| 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 0.00 | 100.00
-----------+-------------------------------------------------------+----------
NA | 0 2 1 3 5 | 11
| 0.00 18.18 9.09 27.27 45.45 | 100.00
-----------+-------------------------------------------------------+----------
P | 52 266 71 295 422 | 1,106
| 4.70 24.05 6.42 26.67 38.16 | 100.00
-----------+-------------------------------------------------------+----------
PS | 32 224 24 52 130 | 462
| 6.93 48.48 5.19 11.26 28.14 | 100.00
-----------+-------------------------------------------------------+----------
S | 103 397 72 237 311 | 1,120
| 9.20 35.45 6.43 21.16 27.77 | 100.00
-----------+-------------------------------------------------------+----------
Total | 187 889 168 588 868 | 2,700
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