Introduction to Stata

This repository contains the materials used in the crash course "Introduction to Stata", offered to the first year students of the doctoral program in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento (Academic Year 2020-2021). Notions are accompanied by short practical exercises.

Contents:

Introductory Notes

• What is Stata?
• Historical Sketch
• Pros and Cons of Stata
• How to Use Stata

Workflow and Preliminaries

• Organizing your Project
• .do Files
• Memory Allocation
• Setting up a Working Directory
• Master .do Files
• Log Files
• Read and Save: Excel
• Read and Save: Delimited Files
• Read and Save: Stata .dta Files
• Alternative Formats

Data Cleaning and Processing

• The Importance of Data Cleaning
• Data Types in Stata
• Numeric and String Data
• Changing Data Types
• Dropping/Keeping Variables and Observations
• Inspecting and Handling Missing Values
• Creating New Variables
• Renaming Variables
• Assigning Lables
• Sorting Data
• Combining Data

Exploratory Data Analysis

• First Look: list, codebook and inspect
• Generating Descriptive Statistics
• Distribution Tables
• Bivariate Analysis: Chi-square Test
• Bivariate Analysis: t-tests
• Bivariate Analysis: Pearson's Correlation
• Visualization: Histograms
• Visualization: Bar Charts
• Visualization: Box Plots
• Visualization: Scatter Plots
• Visualization: Regression Plots