1. QS101 – Introduction to Quantitative Methods in Social Science Week 2: Introduction to Stata and Preparation of Field Work Florian Reiche Teaching Fellow in Quantitative Methods Course Director, BA Politics and Sociology Deputy Director for Student Experience and Progression, PAIS

2. The Route Today Two Parts Introduction to Stata
Preparation of Field Work

3. Resource Update

4. PART 1

5. Conventions
Normal Text
Stata commands

6. The First Screen
Command History
Output
Variable List
Command Line

7. describe

8. What does a data set look like?  edit
Variables
Observations

9. Naming Variables Bad examples: q23, fubar, GenExp1
Good examples: age, gender, etc.
No blanks
Start with a letter
Up to 10 characters
Lower case

10. Entering data 1
Start with the following commands:
clear
edit

11. Edit / Browse
Variable List
Properties

12. Change Variable names

13. Syntax
rename var1 id

14. Data sample What is your gender? Male 1 Female 2 Rate Warwick Awesome
Even more Awesome
Most Awesomest 3

15. Value Labels

16. Value labels (contd.)

17. Value labels (contd.)

18. Value labels (contd.)

19. Syntax again rename var2 gender label define sex 1 "Male" 2 "Female"
label values gender sex
If you want to look at an overview, type:
codebook gender

20. Save the data set
File  Save as  .dta

21. Good to know
If you accidentally enter a letter, Stata turns the variable into a “string” variable
Simple remedy:
destring varlist, replace
e.g. destring id, replace

22. PART 2

24. The Task Topic: The Intro Week Experience
Conduct a small survey to assess how students assess the quality of intro week
N: ~10
Design a questionnaire with about 10 questions
Interviews will be conducted next week

25. A Guide to Questionnaire Design
Conducting a Survey is complex
You will learn this later on during the degree
Here:
Purpose defined
Population: Students of Warwick Uni
Type: Face to Face

26. A Guide to Questionnaire Design (contd.)
Be clear about the focus of your research
Which issues do you want to assess?  This will determine the focus of the questions you ask

27. A Guide to Questionnaire Design (contd.)
Decide on a particular sequence of questions
Prepare to tell people what the survey is about (intro statement)
Begin with interesting questions
More sensitive questions at the end (?)
In any case, sequence needs to be logical

28. How to ask questions Avoid leading questions Be short and sweet
No double negations, or double questions

29. A Guide to Questionnaire Design (contd.)
Open versus closed questions
Here: closed questions
Single versus multiple response
Here: Single response
Likert Scales
Very interesting, interesting, uninteresting, very uninteresting

30. Off you pop! Come together in groups of 3
Use the rest of the seminar to design your questionnaire
Work on the questionnaire until next week, and make sure it is ready (see homework)
Use literature!
Put in at least 3 hours!

31. Homework, seminar, week 3
Ensure to have a finalised version of your questionnaire ready.
Make sufficient hard copies of the questionnaire to conduct individual interviews (unless you want to go digital).