This page offers guidance about how to undertake basic tasks of data management, statistical analysis, and data visualization using Stata software. While Stata is only one package among many with these capabilities, it is widely used by both faculty and students in the Department of Sociology.
The documents to which you may link below are meant to serve as an introduction to Stata, or as a refresher/reminder for those who have not used it in some time. They cover only its basic functionality, making no claim to being comprehensive. Stata performs many other tasks. As well, additional options and refinements exist for most of those tasks that are covered here. This guidance is to get you started.
If you need to know more about Stata than these documents cover, some sources that could be helpful (there are many others beyond these) include:
- Help menus within Stata
- Books such as Alan Acock’s A Gentle Introduction to Stata
- A much more comprehensive website about Stata maintained by the Institute for Digital Research and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles: https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/
- The Department of Sociology’s Quantitative Fellow
BASIC DATA MANAGEMENT
- Getting Started with Stata
- Reading in Stata Format (.dta) Data Files
- Importing an Excel or Text Data File into Stata
- Saving a Dataset in Stata Format
- Recoding and Labeling Variables
- Creating a “Do” File
- Creating a “Log” File
BASIC STATISTICAL ANALYSES
- Tabulations and Summary Statistics for One Variable
- Hypothesis Testing About a Mean or Proportion
- Confidence Intervals About a Mean or Proportion
- Obtaining Tables of Descriptive Statistics, Separately for Groups
- Testing for a Difference between Two Group Means
- Crosstabulations of Two Categorical Variables
- Correlation and Covariance
- Bivariate Regression Analysis
- Multiple Linear Regression Analysis
- Multiple Linear Regression Analysis with Indicator Variables
- Logistic Regression Analysis
BASIC GRAPHICS/VISUALIZATION