Introduction to STATA

This course is best suited for students who have no experience with Stata, but who bring in basic statistical skills, e.g. some knowledge of descriptive, bivariate and multivariate statistics. The aim is to give an idea of how Stata can be best used to conduct statistical analyses. Stata strongly relies on the command line interface. Thus, the course gives an insight to general construction of Stata code (syntax). The instructors also try to help students to write clear and parsimonious Stata commands and to improve do-files and do-file documentation. Essentially, students learn to use do-files as a simple lab-book, where annotations and ideas can be recorded in addition to the raw code and in order to facilitate replicable analyses. In detail, we will start off by introducing the software package Stata. What is it? What does the Stata interface look like? How does it work? We achieve this by giving an applied overview of the various screens and windows. We will learn the first simple commands by analysing an example dataset on on socio-cultural integration of recent immigrants in four European countries. Depending on the specific interests of the participants, the Saturday afternoon session will focus on variations of regression models. The session will cover the basics of regression models. Depending on the research interests of the participants, we can then move on to either logit models, interaction terms, an introduction to loops and macros, or longitudinal models.

• Basic statistical knowledge is assumed (e.g. descriptive statistics, basics of regression analysis)
• No previous knowledge of Stata is required
• Please note that the course does not give a detailed insight into the statistical procedures, and the underlying mathematics, but introduces how to use standard statistical procedures in Stata
• The course offers some guidance on how to structure the workflow in Stata and how to use some simple programming techniques (simple loops)