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 then move on to data management (importing and exporting data from various sources, recoding variables and labels, generating new variables), uni- and bivariate statistics. On Saturday morning, we will cover the basics of regression models. Depending on the specific interests of the participants, the Saturday afternoon session will focus on more advanced topics, such as variations of regression models (e.g. logistic regression), graphs and tables of results, and loops and macros.

• Basic statistical knowledge is assumed (e.g. descriptive statistics, basics of regression analysis)
• No previous knowledge of Stata is required
• Knowledge of syntax-based software (e.g. SPSS, R) is helpful but not 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