oneway table in tabout for a common kind of survey item(s)

[Ethan Schoolman]

Hello,

I have a number of survey questions that look like this:

	Not imp.	A little imp.	Imp.	Very imp.
How important is thing X to you?	1	2	3	4
How important is thing Y to you?	1	2	3	4
How important is thing Z to you?	1	2	3	4

How do I produce (and export) a oneway table where the percentages/frequencies in each box, for each item, are positioned in sequential columns, just like the question is organized? And all the sub-items are rows in the same table? I have not been able to figure out how to do this using such commands as tabout, tabm, fre, etc.

Any help appreciated.

Best,
Ethan

[Mike Lacy]

Here's a quick approach that would get you better than halfway there, with a rough table you could copy and paste. I'm presuming you have individual data, with variables named questX, questY, and questZ.

reshape long quest, i(id) j(topic) string
tab2 topic quest, row

[Ethan Schoolman]

Mike: Thank you! This does seem to work, and it can be followed by a tabout command:

tabout topic income using "${section_1}_reshaped.tex", ///
replace ///
c(row) row npos(col)

But, though your solution works, Mike, it's seems like a workaround for something that ought to be easier. I'll have to "reshape" the data differently for each series of survey items structured this way. And this is such a common kind of survey question. I wonder if anyone has a solution that can work with the original "wide" data?