Hello Statalist,

I have a general question about multiple imputations method in Stata.
There are multiple variables with missing data for my analysis, and I want to use MI. The problem is that a certain group of participants did not answer a particular question by design. As a result, the variable is missing for that group. In detail, the question was for anyone who had a child/children at the time of the survey, so those who did not have a child at the time of the survey did not answer the question at all.

I am not sure how to use MI for this variable. This is an important variable in the model, so I cannot exclude it.
One way might be to assign a certain value to those participants (e.g., -9) and treat it like non-missing then do MI. But I am not sure if this would create bias or not.

I would appreciate any advice on this issue.
Thank you.