Suggested answer to exercise: Readmission to hospital for asthmatic children using Stata 9, 1

Question 1: How many children are there and how many were readmitted?

Suggested answer

To find out how many children there are, we need only use describe, or the F3 key. This gives us:

. describe

Contains data from readmit.dta
  obs:         1,034                          
 vars:            10                          
 size:        17,578 (99.8% of memory free)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
              storage  display     value
variable name   type   format      label      variable label
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
sex             byte   %8.0g       sex        sex
age             byte   %8.0g                  age (years)
wheeze          int    %8.0g                  hours of wheezing
admiss          byte   %8.0g                  previous admissions
pulse           int    %8.0g                  pulse (beats/min)
resp            byte   %8.0g                  respiration (breaths/min)
crisis          byte   %8.0g       crisis     crisis plan
readmit         byte   %8.0g       readmit    readmitted
stay            byte   %8.0g                  length of stay (days)
time            int    %8.0g                  follow-up time (days)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sorted by:  

Hence there are 1,034 children in the data set.

To find out how many were readmitted, we can use the tabulate command:

. tab  readmit

 readmitted |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
         no |        492       47.63       47.63
        yes |        541       52.37      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |      1,033      100.00

Note that readmit is coded 0 = “no”, 1 = "yes". You can seee this by

. tab readmit, nolabel

 readmitted |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        492       47.63       47.63
          1 |        541       52.37      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |      1,033      100.00

Hence we have 1034 children, of whom we have information about readmission on 1033. Of these, 541 were readmitted, 52.37%.


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Last updated: 6 February, 2008.

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