Issue with scatter graph.

[Sarah Quartz]

Why does it look like this? I'm trying to do a correlation comparison between my DV and IV. How do I fix this?

[Nick Cox]

Please post graphs as .png attachments. https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#stata Screenshots are specifically advised against.

Otherwise, your graph shows that all possible combinations of two 11-point scales each 0(1)10 are found in your data.

In any sufficiently large dataset in social science, every possibility is instantiated.

Each person saying 3 and 7, for example, is equivalent to any other person saying 3 and 7 and the points belong at the same coordinates.

You can get something different with e.g. jitter() as an option or tabplot from the Stata Journal.

[Nick Cox]

Cross-posted here https://www.reddit.com/r/stata/comme...ook_like_this/

We ask that you tell us about cross-posting. That is in the FAQ Advice all posters are asked to read before posting.

The aim is that people don't waste their time saying things already said. That failed in this case. Reddit people should be able to look after themselves, but telling them would also have been a good idea.

[Weiwen Ng]

Cross-posted here https://www.reddit.com/r/stata/comme...ook_like_this/

We ask that you tell us about cross-posting. That is in the FAQ Advice all posters are asked to read before posting.

The aim is that people don't waste their time saying things already said. That failed in this case. Reddit people should be able to look after themselves, but telling them would also have been a good idea.

I initially wrote that I'd answered the question on Reddit (Mr Smith is my Reddit nom de guerre, very long story), but wasn't sure if I should follow through, because I wasn't sure if they were the same poster (pretty different usernames).

Now that Nick has done so, I will add for Sarah's benefit: the general Stata forum policy is that we discourage helping people with homework. We do not know your policy on outside assistance. It benefits people to work through the problems themselves as well. The universities definitely pay their teaching assistants and professors to be responsive to questions. (This is explained in the forum FAQ.) In retrospect, given the do file in the screenshot (which is identical between posts), this might have been a homework problem.

This is a technical question about how a command works, so I'm OK with answering, but I don't feel good answering anything more substantive.

PS, whoever wrote that do file ... I can't see the code, but this is a universal issue with scatterplots of categorical values, and they had to have known this would happen, right?