Teaching Stata—some reflections after 8 years of

training experiences

Karen Robson

York University

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

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

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)

Topics for IntroDay 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

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

• 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– Spearman’s rho– Day 3 Exercises (Part 2)

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

• 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

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

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

Things I’m always asked

• I do ________________ in SPSS. How do I do it in Stata?

• Why don’t we just use the drop-down windows?

• Why is labelling variables so complicated?

• Why can’t I leave the data window open when I run commands?

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

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 can’t be serious)

New Projects

• Stata vs. SPSS manuscript