COURSE OVERVIEW

Up and Running in Stata provides participants with the necessary introductory toolset to enable them to carry out efficient data analysis and data management in Stata in a reproducible manner. The course covers everything from the very basics, in order to get one up and running in Stata, to an overview of the available Stata commands for preliminary data analysis, data management, importing and exporting data formats, merging of databases and the creation of graphs in Stata.

 

In common with TStat’s training philosophy, Up and Running in Stata is by its very nature to be considered very much a hands on approach to learning Stata course. Each individual session is composed of both a theoretical component and an applied segment, during which participants have the opportunity to implement the techniques illustrated under the watchful eye of the course tutor.

 

TARGET AUDIENCE

This course is invaluable to both professionals and researchers (working in Epidemiology, Business Studies, Marketing and Management, Biostatistics, Economics, Epidemiology, Medicine, Public Health, Social and Political Sciences and Statistics), wishing to use Stata for applied statistical analysis, data management or data visualization.

 

PREREQUISITES

Familiarity with PCs and a working knowledge of English.

 

PROGRAM


SESSION I: GETTING STARTED

  1. Stata’s GUI
  2. Stata File formats
  3. Interacting with your Operating System from within Stata
  4. Working interactively in Stata
    • Organizing one’s work in Stata
    • Help
    • Web resources
    • Updates
    • Downloading user written commands in Stata
  5. Interrupting Stata Sessions
  6. Loading Stata databases
  7. Saving databases in Stata
  8. Saving output: the log file
  9. Exiting the software

 

SESSION II: STATA FUNDAMENTALS

  1. Visualizing the data
  2. Stata’s Syntax
  3. Abbreviations in Stata
  4. Constrained commands
  5. Data Types
  6. Format command
  7. Labels
  8. Value Labels
  9. Summarizing the data:
    • Summary Statistics
    • Statistical Tables
  10. The by prefix
  11. Selecting / eliminating variables – drop, keep
  12. The commands count and sort
  13. Renaming variables – rename
  14. display
  15. assert
  16. Missing Values
  17. Create, eliminate, transform data
    • generate, egen, replace, recode

 

SESSION III: CREATING SIMPLE STATA ROUTINES: DO FILES

 

SESSION IV: IMPORTING DATA FROM SPREADSHEETS 

  1. Importing an Excel file using drop down menus
  2. Importing an Excel directly in Stata: import excel
  3. Importing a text file created from a spreadsheet: insheet
  4. Importing a text file: import delimited
  5. Importing SPSS databases
  6. Verifying the Data
  7. Likely Issues:
    • Missing values
    • Strings: encode, decode, destring, tostring
    • Handling dates
  8. Exporting data to ASCII/txt files to be read in spreadsheets: outsheet

SESSION V: MERGING DATA BASES

  1. The concepts master and using databases
  2. append command
  3. Merging data
    • merge command
    • Merging one to one by observations
    • Merging one to one using one or more unique identifying variables
    • How do we make sure the identifying variables are unique
    • The system variables _merge
  4. updates command
  5. Use the append and merge commands
  6. The concepts of wide and long data format

 

SESSION VI: GRAPHICS – AN INTRODUCTION

  1. Stata graphics
  2. Graph command syntax
  3. Reading, saving and exporting graphs
  4. Useful commands
  5. Overview of various graph types
  6. Personalizing a graph
  7. The Graph Editor
  8. Combining and overlaying graphs

 

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