Calculating and Creating Variables from Ordinal Data

[daszlosek]

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!

[ballardw]

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

[daszlosek]

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

[Reeza]

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.

[daszlosek]

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.

[SteveDenham]

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