How to Preserve Missing Values with Stata’s Collapse Command

© Soldeandalucia | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

You are a code-writing machine.

That 3-day project you started this morning might actually be completed by the end of the day.

As your fingers fly across the keyboard, you think you can hear Stata singing your praise softly in the background.

Then IT happens…

Your programs stops working right. The data begin looking like something from one of Lord Voldemort’s nightmares.

Your finely-tuned debugging skills kick in, and you track down the problem. That -collapse- command you issued a while back did something rather odd. It replaced all of the missing values in your data set with zeros!

But that’s not at all what you wanted! You wanted those to be missing values, not zeros.

Yep, we’ve all been there. Even the most seasoned Stata users get bit by this quirk every once in a while.

In this article, I show three ways Stata can treat missing values when using the -collapse- command and the sum() function.