Summarize command in Stata

In a previous post we looked briefly at the summarize command, let’s look a bit deeper. When opening a new dataset it’s a great way to get an overiview of the data, or a summary if you will:

sysuse nlsw88, clear
summarize

The syntax of the summarize command is as follows:

command [varlist] [if] [in] [weight] [, options]

For instance we can get summary statistics of wage for southern residents:

summarize wage if south==1

Or we can look at wage levels if total work life experience is less than five years, like so:

summarize wage if ttl_exp < 5

Similarly, in the auto dataset, we can compare the mpg variable for foreign cars:

sysuse auto, clear
summarize mpg if foreign == 1

To get detailed summary statistics of a variable, such as rep78:

summarize rep78, detail

Here we are presented with a detailed summary for the variable rep78, in the form of percentiles, number of observations, mean, standard deviation, skewness and more.