What are value labels in Stata?

label define defines a list of up to 65,536 (1,000 for Small Stata) associations of integers and text called value labels. Value labels are attached to variables by label values. label values attaches a value label to varlist. If . is specified instead of lblname, any existing value label is detached from that varlist.

How can we assign value label in Stata?

Adding a value label to a variable in Stata is a two-step process. The first step is to use the . label define command to create a mapping between numeric values and the words or phrases used to describe those values. The second step is to associate a specific mapping with a particular variable using the .

How do I see labels in Stata?

If you don’t remember name of the label attached to a variable, you can find it with the help of the describe or the codebook command (just insert the variable name after the respective command). As of Stata version 12, value labels are also shown in the “Variables” section of the Properties window.

What is a variable label?

Variable label is human readable description of the variable. R supports rather long variable names and these names can contain even spaces and punctuation but short variables names make coding easier. Variable label can give a nice, long description of variable.

What does encode mean in Stata?

Description. encode creates a new variable named newvar based on the string variable varname, creating, adding to, or just using (as necessary) the value label newvar or, if specified, name.

How do I label values in R?

To understand value labels in R, you need to understand the data structure factor. You can use the factor function to create your own value labels. Use the factor() function for nominal data and the ordered() function for ordinal data. R statistical and graphic functions will then treat the data appriopriately.

What are factor variables in Stata?

Factor variables refer to Stata’s treatment of categorical variables. Factor variables create indicator variables for the levels (categories) of categorical variables and, optionally, for their interactions. In what follows, the word level means the value that a categorical variable takes on.

What are the benefits of using value labels?

And it makes data entry much more efficient–you can type in 1 and 0 for Male and Female much faster than you can type out those whole words, or even M and F. But by having Value Labels, your data and output still give you the meaningful values.