Seasonality line graph

[Anabelle Reed]

Hi, I have a panel dataset for 308 authorities from 2014Q1 to 2018Q4. My dependent variable is HDRR (recycling rate).

I was wondering if someone knew the code for me to graph average HDRR for each quarter, to create a line graph?
Or is an alternative way to showing seasonality in a graph in stata?

Thanks

[Nick Cox]

Let's suppose the dates are in qdate

Then

egen mean = mean(HDRR), by(qdate)

averages across authorities for each date. The results will be a mess but some variation on

sort authority qdate 

line HDRR qdate, c(L) lc(gs12) lw(vthin) || line mean qdate , lw(thick)

might help and might indicate whether

1. a transformed scale would work better

2. a summary other than, or additional to, the mean would help

[Andrew Musau]

You need to collapse the data first to get quarterly averages. Below, subtitute time with the name of your time variable and adjust the x-axis labels appropriately.

preserve
collapse HDRR, by(time)
tw line HDRR time, xlabel(`=tq(2014q1)'(3)`=tq(2018q4)')
restore

NB. Crossed with Nick's helpful reply.