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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
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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 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
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