Labeling Dummy Variables

[Lena Gan]

Hi
This may sound silly but I am having problems labeling the Stata output from 0 to YES and 1 to NO. I don't know what I am doing wrong. See below commands and table output. Thank you.

. la define own_home 0 "yes" 1 "no"

. fre own_home

own_home -- do you own a home, recoded ea_1
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Freq. Percent Valid Cum.
--------------+--------------------------------------------
Valid 0 | 3949 78.28 78.68 78.68
1 | 1070 21.21 21.32 100.00
Total | 5019 99.48 100.00
Missing . | 26 0.52
Total | 5045 100.00
-----------------------------------------------------------

[Rich Goldstein]

after you define a label, you must actually "use" it; you want something like

la val own_home own_home

see

help label

[Clyde Schechter]

As an aside, coding 0 for yes and 1 for no is going to get you in trouble if you use Stata's logical expressions with these variables later on, since Stata expects the opposite. I suggest you recode these variables and change the value labels accordingly. (Alternatively you could negate the names of the variables: -rename own_home doesnt_own_home-.)