generate a political party dummy variable HELP

[Nathan Munns]

Hi, I am new to stata so would appreciate the help with what I realise is probably quite a basic question
Essentially I am running a statistical project where we are looking at if political party affiliation effects view on britain. To run these regressions we have a data set that contains the variable "partyfw" which contains the list of parties. However I need to create dummy variables of each party so we can see the individual impact, how can i do this? when i enter the code: gen Conservative = (partyfw == "Conservative") it gives me an error message. Please help?

[Maarten Buis]

Just add i.partyfw to your regression model. The i. prefix makes the dummy (I prefer indicator) variables for you. The added advantage is that when using the i. prefix, Stata's post-estimation commands (like margins or etable) will know that these are indicator variables and can use that information.

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[Rich Goldstein]

making some guesses about your data (please read the FAQ and follow its advice in the future), you could encode the data (you might want to set up labels first) and then use factor variable notation; see

h encode
h fvvarlist