Speaking Stata: Ordering or ranking groups of observations

Abstract

Results for categorical variables may often be clearer if those variables are reordered or reranked, say, according to some measure of absolute or relative frequency or according to summaries of some other variable. Some graphical and tabulation commands have dedicated options serving that end. Otherwise, in practice a new order is often best achieved by creating a new variable holding the desired order using one or another egen function. There is usually a need to preserve the information in existing values or value labels and to watch out for ties. There may be a desire to reverse the direction of ranking from the default. I discuss procedures for datasets based on aggregate frequencies and for datasets based on individuals and introduce a new convenience command, myaxis, that handles many cases directly.