Regression of specific value of a variable

[Piotr Pawlak]

Hi,
I'm new to STATA. I'm doing the regression model and I have variable mlstat (martial status) which contain six values (married, separated, divorced etc).

Is there a sense in making a regression of mlstat or should I do the regression of married or divorced?? If I should go with married, how can I do this?

Thanks for every answer!
Piotr Pawlak

[Clyde Schechter]

Is there a sense in making a regression of mlstat or should I do the regression of married or divorced??

That depends on your research goals. What you are asking is basically not a statistical question, nor a Stata question, but a question about the substance of your research. If your research goals are such that having a fine-grained distinction of levels of marital status in your analysis, then reducing it to just married vs not married would be a bad idea. But if marital status is just a more or less incidental variable in your problem, and if the distinctions among all the different ways one can be non-married do not seem relevant, then collapsing to a dichotomous married/non-married might be a good idea. You can do that using the -recode- command. See -help recode- for details.

The one way in which this might become a statistical issue is if the various categories other than married have only small numbers of people, then you might need to combine them into a single non-married category in order to get meaningful results for that variable. Since you have told us really nothing about your data other than it has a variable named mlstat with 6 values, it's hard to say anything more.

In the future, when asking for help with code, show example data, and please use the -dataex- command to do so. If you are running version 17, 16 or a fully updated version 15.1 or 14.2, -dataex- is already part of your official Stata installation. If not, run -ssc install dataex- to get it. Either way, run -help dataex- to read the simple instructions for using it. -dataex- will save you time; it is easier and quicker than typing out tables. It includes complete information about aspects of the data that are often critical to answering your question but cannot be seen from tabular displays or screenshots. It also makes it possible for those who want to help you to create a faithful representation of your example to try out their code, which in turn makes it more likely that their answer will actually work in your data.

When asking for help with code, always show example data. When showing example data, always use -dataex-.