Describe/List: Exploring Your Data
Once your data is in a Stata dataset, whether by data entry using the data editor or imported from another program, the next step is to explore the data. From the File menu, select Open and then select the dataset to open.
There are two commonly used features to explore the characteristics of a set of data. These are the describe command and list command. Describing Your Dataset From the Stata menu, select Data, then select Describe data and then Describe data in memory. In the pop-up window that appears, simply click on the OK button to obtain a description of all variables in memory. You may be surprised to find that selecting Describe from the Data menu does not produce descriptive statistics. Rather, it provides a list of the number of observations and variables in the dataset, dataset size, variable names, types and labels. An example is shown below:
=============================================================
Contains data from C:\user\STAT\Stata\internetxls.dta
obs: 507
vars: 15 29 Jul 2008 18:31
size: 81,120 (99.2% of memory free)
-----------------------------------------------------------
storage display value
variable name type format label variable label
------------------------------------------------------------
age byte %8.0g Age
gender str1 %9s Gender
enrolledmember str3 %9s Enrolledmember
tribe str23 %23s Tribe
email str1 %9s Email
homecomputer str1 %9s HomeComputer
homeinternet str1 %9s HomeInternet
yrseduc float %9.0g YrsEduc
radio str16 %16s Radio
newspaper str16 %16s Newspaper
internet_use str16 %16s Internet_use
two_website str55 %55s Two_website
read_email str16 %16s Read_email
knowbroadb str1 %9s KnowBroadB
broad_access str1 %9s Broad_access
------------------------------------------------------------
Listing Your Data
It's a good idea to look at your raw data before beginning any statistical analyses. However, if you have thousands of records (and you would know the number of records by the Describe command you just executed above), you certainly don't want to list all of them. To list the first ten observations in a dataset:
- From the Stata menu, select Data,
- Select Describe data
- Select list data.
- In the pop-up window that appears (shown below), select the by/if/in tab.
- In the next pop-up window that appears (also shown below), select the by/if/in tab.
- Check the box labeled use a range of observations and enter the numbers 1 and 10 in the from and to boxes, then click the OK button.
By/If/In/Window
Listing of the First Ten Records in the Dataset
list age gender enrolled member tribe in 1/10
+-----------------------------------------+
| age gender enroll~r tribe |
|-----------------------------------------|
1. | 37 M N |
2. | 24 M Y OMAHA |
3. | 27 M Y ONEIDA |
4. | 28 M Y STANDING ROCK |
5. | 42 M Yes N/A |
|-----------------------------------------|
6. | 26 M N |
7. | 23 M Y OTOE |
8. | 28 F Y Spirit Lake |
9. | 19 M Y PEQUOT |
10. | 12 F N |
+-----------------------------------------+
Last updated:
December 03, 2008