How to add categorical control variables to my regression

[Caroline Jaszuk]

Hello!

I am doing a regression in Stata of my dependent variable and 4 independent variables. They are all measured on a Likert-scale from 1-7. I would like to run a model with my control variables:
- gender (numerical 1=male 2 = female)
- country (categorical variable)
- employees (categorical variable)
- age (categorical variable - I have 6 age categories)
- education (categorical - 3 categories)
- industry ( categorical - 13 categories)

How should I include them in the model? At the moment the result I get is "no observations". Should I transform my control variables somehow to include them? The regression with just independent variables works and provides results.

Thank you!

[Hemanshu Kumar]

You should check

help factor variables

to see how estimation commands like regress can work with categorical variables.

However, for this, the categorical variables need to be numeric and not string. I suspect your categorical variables are the latter, which is why you are getting messages like "no observations". To convert from string to numeric categorical variables, check

help encode