Random sampling

[Tina Samuel]

Hello, I have a dataset of 102 nurseries, I want to randomly sample 16 out of them. I tried the sample and bsample codes but they are not functioning properly. whenever I run them I get 3, 1, or even no nurseries at all. I don't understand what's wrong.
Would greatly appreciate your insight.

[Andrew Musau]

If an observation is a nursery in the dataset, you can just use the -rnormal()- function to select the sample.

gen selector= rnormal()
sort selector
gen sample=_n<=16
list if sample

[Tina Samuel]

Thank you for your help. I tried running and I still have the same issue, only 4 or 5 nurseries appear. Noting that my dataset is composed of 4 variables, they are all strings.
The variables are basically : Nursery Name, NGO, Manager, Mobile number.
I want to draw the sample for the nursery name but for some reason it keeps on producing missing randoms.

[Andrew Musau]

I cannot follow this. Can you copy and paste the exact command that you typed and the Stata output that shows what you state? If you can share the data, present a sample of the dataset using the dataex command.

dataex

[Tina Samuel]

I figured out what was wrong, turned out there about 800 missing observations that's why the code wasn't functioning properly.
Thank you for your help!