Using means of multiple variable to create new variable

[Eli Omo]

Hi,

I want to use the mean of multiple variables to create a new variable containing the means of the different variables. I also want to be able to use the new variable to perform calculations , will Stata still be to identify the original source of the means ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Welcome to the forum. Yes, Stata can do this. The details of how depend on your data and what you want to do with it. For example:

egen mean_myvar = mean(myvar)

Will make a new variable called -mean_myvar- and will place in it the mean of that variable, -myvar-, for every observation. There are other ways but are a little more advanced. For some more details, see:

help egen
help summarize

Since you have tagged multiple imputation in your post, I presume your end goal is to do mean imputation. Stata has a pretty convenient and powerful suite of tools for multiple imputation, and is worth reading in depth about. See -help mi intro substantive- and -help mi intro-.

[Eli Omo]

Hi ,

I tried using this code even mean_myvar = mean(var1 va2r var3) but the function is apparently unknown .

Just to clarify what I wanted to do: I have a set of different variables ( var1, var2 etc) with different means and I want to make a new variable that consists of the means of the different variables.

[Raymond Zhang]

Please help egen.

egen mean_myvar = rowmean(var1 va2r var3)

[Eli Omo]

Thank you very much for the answer