Hi,

I am analysing my data using multinominal logit. Firstly sorry that I cannot post my data and full results here.

Let call dependent variable "P3", and I have several independent variables: "treatment" , "P1", "age", "iq", "female", "mistakes", "major". The one I'm interested in is "treatment", and I think that "P1" has be included in the regression as a control. "P3" and "P1" are measuring the same thing before and after the treatment, and they have 7 categories. The sample size is small, 157, with two missing value in Female, so N=155.

I am running into a problem of getting very large standard error of coefficient, such as 8280 of one category of P1. Almost every such large standard error happens with one of the category of P1.

I looked at the cross-table of P1 and P3, and found there are some empty cells. The partial table looks like this.

Code:

P1        |                                P3
            |        -2         -1          0          1          2          3          4 |     Total
-----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------
         3 |         0          0          0          0          1          2          2 |         5
         4 |         0          0          0          0          0          3        13 |        16
-----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------
I am wondering if these empty cells cause the enormous standard error. I know that the sample size is very small, and the number of independent variable are relatively too larger to sample size, should I switch to -firthlogit-?

Thanks for any help!!