Teaching Stata

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Teaching Statasome reflections after 8 years of
training experiences

• Karen Robson
• York University

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Teaching Software

• First World Bank mission to Bosnia Herzegovina
  in 2001 to teach a course to government workers
• Five courses over three years
• Similar training given to Statistical Institute
  employees in Tirana, Albania

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• Asked by Office for National Statistics to
  demonstrate features to employees

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Format

• 3.5 hours a day over 5 days
• First hour lecture/demonstration
• Rest of time working on exercises, gone over at
  beginning of next class
• Support staff one teaching assistant (usually an
  economics PhD student)

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Topics for Intro

• Day 1
• Windowing in Stata
• Creating a do file
• Directories
• Log files
• Opening a data file
• Codebook
• Obtaining summary statistics
• Creating variables
• Frequency distributions
• Dummy variables
• Labeling variables
• Exporting tables
• Day 1 Exercises
• Closing your log file
• Saving your data

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• Day 2
• Building a do file
• Sorting data
• Conditional crosstabulations
• Correlations
• T-tests
• Analysis of Variance
• Factor analysis
• Creating a Scale
• Day 2 Exercises

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• Day 3
• Graphing
• Histograms
• Pie charts
• Scatterplots
• Day 3 Exercises (Part 1)
• Nonparametric techniques
• Mann Whitney U-test
• Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test
• The Kruskall-Wallis H-test
• Spearmans rho
• Day 3 Exercises (Part 2)

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• Day 4
• _n and _N
• Listing cases
• Regression
• Logistic regression
• Quantile Regression
• Weights
• Day 4 Exercises

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• Day 5
• Handling longitudinal data
• Merging data
• Merging files of different levels (hierarchical
  data structures)
• Creating variables out of different levels of
  data
• Day 5 Exercises

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Intermediate Programming

• SESSION 1 FORMING DATASETS AT DIFFERENT LEVELS
  OF AGGREGATION
• session1.do
• Exercise for Session 1
• EXTRA STUFF FOR KEENERS
• SESSION 2 MERGING DATA
• session2.do
• Exercise for Session 2
• EXTRA STUFF FOR KEENERS

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• SESSION 3 HOW TO CREATE A PANEL DATA
• session3.do
• Exercise for Session 3
• session3_exercise.do
• EXTRA STUFF FOR KEENERS
• SESSION 4 LOOPS AND LOCAL MACROS
• Example of the use of a loop and local macro
• session4.do
• Exercise for Session 4
• EXTRA STUFF FOR KEENERS
• SESSION 5 VARIOUS LAST DAY TOPICS
• Multilevel modelling in Stata

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Things Im always asked

• I do ________________ in SPSS. How do I do it in
  Stata?
• Why dont we just use the drop-down windows?
• Why is labelling variables so complicated?
• Why cant I leave the data window open when I run
  commands?

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Things I am always asked

• I heard you can do insert something really
  complicated here in Stata? When you have a
  couple minutes, can you show us how to do
• Multilevel modelling
• Cluster analysis
• Propensity Score Matching

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Things I am always asked

• I need to write my PhD thesis. I have this data.
  What should I do?
• What is a p value?
• How do I make sense of my factor analysis?
  (subtext you cant be serious)

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New Projects

• Stata vs. SPSS manuscript