1. Teaching Stata—some reflections after 8 years of training experiences Karen Robson York University

2. 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

3. Asked by Office for National Statistics to demonstrate features to employees

7. 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)

8. 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

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

10. 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)

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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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?

16. 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

17. 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)

18. New Projects Stata vs. SPSS manuscript