Need help figuring out this command

[Ivana Nguyen]

Hi! I need help with a question on my stats homework and I cannot figure out how to set up this command. This is the question: create a new variable called “Africa” that has the value 1 for African countries and 0 otherwise. Any help would be appreciated!

[Ken Chui]

Hello and welcome to Statalist.

Notice per the online help at https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#adviceextras, homework questions are usually not answered here:

Executive summary: Please do not post homework questions, and please ignore any that are posted.

By `homework' we mean here any coursework assignments for a formal course or module on which you are registered at a university or other institution and for which you will be graded.

There is a grey area here, and members may want to draw the line in slightly different places.

After all, most questions here concern research that will be written up in dissertations, theses, papers, books, or reports. But it is part of a widespread research culture that almost everybody consults others at some point and draws upon their general or specific advice, including -- in the case of Statalist -- Stata code (even new programs posted) and concrete suggestions about data management, data analysis, and graphics.

However, coursework that will be graded raises some very different issues. To start at the sharp end, many institutions have strict rules about plagiarism and collusion. So, consulting others and receiving help from others may place students in difficult situations, with very possible serious risk to their grades and their careers. It is thus not at all in students' best interests.

Most of all, homework is in essence set as fair challenges to students with the expectation that they can work their own way towards answers and will benefit from doing so. All of us have been students at some point, and many of us are academics with teaching roles. Long-term members here tend to agree strongly that the ethos of being helpful stops short of providing help on whatever is obviously homework. Institutions will have their own support rules and set-ups (faculty office hours, teaching assistants, whatever), but out-sourcing homework support to internet forums is not part of any policy we wish to support.

Any policy should be practical as well as founded on respected principles. Clearly, if someone asks a specific question arising from their homework, we often will not know how it arises, and the story ends there. But the main point here is to underline why many members will explicitly decline to support obvious homework and why requests for help on homework will often be ignored. No one can or will forbid anyone else from doing that, but we request that homework questions not be posted and not be answered.

I can, however, send you off with a tips to do an online search using keywords: "Stata generate dummy variable from categorical."

Good luck.

[Ivana Nguyen]

Oh, I did not know this. Thank you for making me aware of this!