From the course: SAS Essential Training: 1 Descriptive Analysis for Healthcare Research

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Creating an index variable

Creating an index variable - SAS Tutorial

From the course: SAS Essential Training: 1 Descriptive Analysis for Healthcare Research

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Creating an index variable

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'm going to show you how to use SAS to create an index variable. An index variable represents a solution you can use when you have a lot of independent variables measuring almost the same thing, such as level of health. We have so many health questions in the BRFSS. Do you have diabetes? Do you have arthritis? Have you ever had a heart attack? It would be nice to boil all of these down to one independent variable. That idea has to do with a principle of parsimony where in a regression, you aim to include the fewest independent variables in your model to explain the most variation in your dependent variable. And of course, I had to show you a picture of a couple of persimmons because the word parsimony already reminds me of this fruit. So when you make an index, in general, you pick what variables you want to boil down into one variable and then decide how many points to give it. If you are making a health index and you are putting both has seasonal…

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