Content:
The course is designed to take smart, knowledgeable people and turn them into proficient interactive users of Stata. The course covers not just the obvious such as getting data into Stata, but also covers lots of detailed techniques and tricks to make you a powerful Stata user.
Course Leaders:
Theresa Boswell, technical services representative at StataCorp
Kevin Crow, technical services analyst at StataCorp
Kerry Kammire, technical services representative at StataCorp
Course Length:
6 weeks (4 lectures)
Dates:
September 12 - October 24, 2008
Cost:
£ 57 + VAT
Prerequisites:
- Stata 10, installed and working
- Basic knowledge of using Stata interactively
- Internet web browser, such as Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Mozilla, installed and working (course is platform independent)
Agenda
Lecture 1: Introduction
The basics
- Using directories to organize your work
- The current directory: a summary
- Dealing with files
- Filenames in Stata
- Loading the automobile data
The basics of Stata
- How Stata conceptualizes data
- Stata's command syntax
- The minimum set of commands everyone should know
- Working interactively: Getting organized
- Working interactively: Making Stata stop
- Working interactively: Keeping logs
- Using the Stata Viewer
Using search and updating Stata
- Installing Stata updates over the web
- Installing new commands over the web: The SJ and the STB
- Installing new commands over the web: Other sources
- Installing new commands: Statalist
Lecture 2: Miscellaneous data management topics
- Working with data
- The data in memory
- Value labels
- Formats
- Other kinds of labels
- Safe computing
- Basic Data reporting
- Data manipulation
- Making strings into numerical variables
- Doing things the long way
- The second solution
- The best solution
- Observation subscripts _n and _N
- Memory management
There is an one-week break between Lectures 2 and 3 in this course because we have found the extra time is necessary for discussion.
Lecture 3: Getting data into STATA
- Obtaining data
- The infile command
- Post-infile processing
- infile with a data dictionary
- The insheet and outsheet commands
- A note on memory management
- Reading multiple lines per observation
- Reading multiple observations per line
- Reading omitted data
- Reading string data
- Reading dates
- Reading large integers
Lecture 4: Data management
- Appending data
- The roles of the master and using datasets
- Merging data
- One-to-one merge
- Match-merge
- Ensuring that identifiers are unique
- One-to-many and many-to-one merges (also known as spreads)
- Many-to-many merges (also known as mistakes)
- Updates
- Using append and merge
- Wide versus long data
- How to think about variables and their contents
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