Liz's Stata Guide

tabulate

Provides a breakdown of the values taken on by a variable, or by two or more variables. It can be abbreviated tab.

Typical Usuage:
tab varx   - or -
tab varx vary   - or -
tab varx, sum(vary)

Examples

• . tab religion
  
  respondent' |
   s religion |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
  ------------+-----------------------------------
    Christian |        254       23.09       23.09
       Muslim |        840       76.36       99.45
        Other |          6        0.55      100.00
  ------------+-----------------------------------
        Total |      1,100      100.00
  

  The last column gives the cumulative percentage.

• . tab religion gender
  
  respondent |
          's |  respondent's gender
    religion |      male     female |     Total
  -----------+----------------------+----------
   Christian |       118        136 |       254 
      Muslim |       444        396 |       840 
       Other |         3          3 |         6 
  -----------+----------------------+----------
       Total |       565        535 |     1,100 
  

  The numbers presented here are frequencies.

• . tab religion, sum(hhsize)
  
  respondent' |      Summary of household size
   s religion |        Mean   Std. Dev.       Freq.
  ------------+------------------------------------
    Christian |   6.9606299   4.7003516         254
       Muslim |   7.6521739   4.6356781         828
        Other |   8.1666667   6.5853372           6
  ------------+------------------------------------
        Total |   7.4935662   4.6668156        1088
  

  This shows the average household size (and the standard deviation and frequenct) based on the religion of the respondent. There were 254 Christian respondents, with an average household size of 6.96.

Options

• The option , nolabel suppresses any labels that may have been put on the values of the variables and displays instead the numeric values.
• When you use tab with two variables, the options , col and , row specify that the relative frequency of the cell within the column or row should be displayed. They are often use with the option , nofreq that suppresses the display of the absolute frequencies.

  . tab religion gender, col nofreq
  
  respondent |
          's |  respondent's gender
    religion |      male     female |     Total
  -----------+----------------------+----------
   Christian |     20.88      25.42 |     23.09 
      Muslim |     78.58      74.02 |     76.36 
       Other |      0.53       0.56 |      0.55 
  -----------+----------------------+----------
       Total |    100.00     100.00 |    100.00 
  

• When used with two variables, the option , chi2 can be used to do a Chi squared test on the independence of the two variables.

  . tab religion gender, chi2
  
  respondent |
          's |  respondent's gender
    religion |      male     female |     Total
  -----------+----------------------+----------
   Christian |       118        136 |       254 
      Muslim |       444        396 |       840 
       Other |         3          3 |         6 
  -----------+----------------------+----------
       Total |       565        535 |     1,100 
  
            Pearson chi2(2) =   3.2026   Pr = 0.202
  

  Here the p-value is 0.202, so the distribution among religions is not significantly different for male and female respdonents.
• The option , gen(newvar_) can be used to generate dummy variables -- for more on this option see the page for generate.

Notes

• Other commands that produce basic summary statistics are table and tabstat.
• See the official Stata help for tabulate.