Bar chart beginner help

[Jacob Green]

Hi , I am trying to recreate the following graph with my own data:

Just an example so you can get an idea of data:

country	ownsaphone	year
Benin	no	2016
Benin	yes	2021
Benin	no	2021
Benin	yes	2016
Botswana	no	2016
Botswana	yes	2016
Botswana	no	2021
Botswana	yes	2021
Burkina faso	no	2016
Burkina faso	yes	2016
Burkina faso	no	2021
Burkina faso	yes	2021
Cameroon	no	2016
Cameroon	yes	2016
Cameroon	no	2021
Cameroon	yes	2021
Conte d Ivoire	no	2016
Conte d Ivoire	yes	2016
Conte d Ivoire	no	2021
Conte d Ivoire	yes	2021
Gabon	no	2016
Gabon	yes	2016
Gabon	no	2021
Gabon	yes	2021
Ghana	no	2016
Ghana	yes	2016
Ghana	no	2021
Ghana	yes	2021

I tried the following :

graph bar (percent) ownsaphone if ownsaphone == 1, over(year) over (country) asyvars blabel (bar, format(%9.1f))

Obviously, this was not the result that I wanted . I need the bars to show the percentage of people that do own a phone. For example, for Benin in 2021 the bar should show that 77.58% of people owns a phone. I now know that I have to pre-calculate the percentage before. However, I am having trouble with this. Any help would be appreciated - thanks.

[Nick Cox]

graph bar ownsaphone, over(year) over (country) asyvars blabel(bar, format(%9.1f))

will show the mean over values of 0 and 1 which is just the proportion with a phone.

To see the mean as a percent on bar totals and the axis, just multiply by 100.

gen ownsaphone2 = ownsaphone * 100

and use that variable instead.

The fallacy in #1 is common and came up only a few days ago with some else doing bar charts. If you condition on ownsaphone being 1, Stata ignores observations with value 0, and the percents calculated will be wrong. They are wrong for other reasons, as you are asking for the percents of the entire data plotted being in each (country, year) pair, which is not at all the same as the percent having a phone in each country and year.

That said, the graph will be a mess unless you tidy up the use of upper and lower case in country names and change to graph hbar or graph dot. Note spellings: Côte (nor Conte) d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso.

Another thought: if you show bar values, you don't need the magnitude axis labels too.