Skip to Main Content
George Mason University InfoGuides

QUANTitative Analysis & Statistics: Stata

Stata is statistical software from StataCorp commonly used by economists, political scientists, and others in academia.

Why Stata?

Stata is considered to be more powerful than SPSS with excellent syntax and programming capabilities, though not necessarily as flexible as SAS and R. People who know Stata often prefer it over SPSS and SAS because of the balance between difficulty and power. However, it is used far less than the other statistical softwares.

Access to Stata
Changes over Time

Some experienced researchers and older tutorials do not use these newer features of Stata that are much better. 

Best Introductory Workshop: 

  • Ready. Set. Go Stata (~45 min),
    • Offers both live and recorded (e.g., v19v18) webinars. 
    • Navigation, working directory, opening files, toolbars, generate, dialog boxes, value labels, variable types, encoding, do files, describe, codebook, summarize, table, dtable, histogram, scatterplot, regression (~25 min), post-estimation, margins, and help (~30 min)
    • Undergraduates may prefer Stata for Students

Best for Research Data Management:

More Great Resources from Stata Corp

All Resources and Support, including their own list of community contributed Resources for learning Stata

Video Tutorials

Written Tutorials

NOTE: The help documentation for Stata goes far beyond just explaining how to use the software, and includes tips on what to do and how to interpret the output. However, it can be a little intimidating to the new user and may take some time to get used to. Nevertheless, if you intend to use Stata for a dissertation or a job, it will be important to rely on the documentation.

More Comprehensive Resources

All UCLA ATS Stata content

Videos
Lists of Topics
Specific Pages

The below are free for George Mason University students, faculty, and staff. You may need to log in.

From LinkedIn Learning

From O'Reilly

Shorter Video Tutorials

Short Courses for Specific Groups

Alan Neustadtl

Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland

U Rochester

 

Videos on Analysis

Need More?

Links to pages and pdfs on a variety of topics, including specific analyses and data management techniques.

Books

Data Management & Bivariate Statistics

Accompanies Peter Galderisi. (2015). Understanding Political Science Statistics: Observations and Expectations in Political Analysis
Follow-along examples and exercises on using Stata (v12), Data Management, and basic univariate and bivariate data analysis.

From a professor of Sociology; covers up to bivariate analysis, integrating data management and other techniques to use Stata (v15) effectively.

Regression & More

Accompanies the Open Source textbook Introduction to Political Science Research Methods
Learn Stata (v16) by following along importing and exploring a dataset with regression modeling including panel data.