topic Re: Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data in Statistical Procedures

Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

daszlosek — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 15:22:46 GMT

Hello Everyone!

I have a 24 level ordinal variable that I am trying to create a 5 level variable from based on percentiles (50th, 70th, 85th, 90th, and 95th). I have not been able to find any good example online to work off of.

Thank you!

Re: Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

ballardw — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:56:25 GMT

Examples of what your data currently looks like for that variable?

Re: Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

daszlosek — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 17:30:26 GMT

For example if you ran a proc freq

Variable_name Frequency

0 758

1 854

2 975

3 257

4 651

5 475

6 358

7 842

. .

24: 758

Re: Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

Reeza — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 17:38:36 GMT

I'm not sure how an ordinal variable maps to percentiles makes a lot of sense.

In your proc freq output there should be a variable called cumulative percentage. You can use that to recode to 5 categories based on your cutoffs.

Re: Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

daszlosek — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 17:42:45 GMT

Me neither, but my boss wants them this and and stated she has seen it in literature before. I am only familiar with doing percentiles on continuous variables.

Re: Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

SteveDenham — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 20:30:26 GMT

Well, 24 is kind of, sort of, like a lot of ordinal categories, and with that many observations, you should get a fairly interesting cumulative distribution. Maybe you could fit an empirical distribution function to the data, and use that to get the percentile cutpoints.

Steve Denham