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This is a "starting point" guide for those taking a statistics and [quantitative] data analysis courses and/or doing a data analysis project.
Stata is statistical software from StataCorp that is commonly used by economists, political scientists, and others in academia. 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.
Some experienced researchers and older tutorials do not use these newer features of Stata that are much better.
For a 45 min video introduction see:
The below resources all have a variety of video and written resources on basic and advanced topics.
See the tabs for links directly to some specific useful resources.
All Resources and Support, including their own list of community contributed Resources for learning Stata
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.
There are videos AND text with screenshots as you prefer and you can and should follow along with the instructions.
The below are free for George Mason University students, faculty, and staff.
From LinkedIn Learning
Advanced and Specialized Statistics with Stata (~5 hrs) - Includes data management, visualization, and interactions, plus special circumstances such as panel data, count data, and survival analysis
From O'Reilly
All Packt Publishing Courses - some have been removed
These focus on using Stata, but also include data exploration and multiple regression. These features haven't changed much, so older tutorials are typically sufficient.
Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
Understanding Political Science Statistics Using Stata by
This manual walks students through the procedures for analysis in Stata and provides exercises that go hand-in-hand with online data sets. The manual complements the textbook Understanding Political Science Statistics: Observations and Expectations in Political Analysis, by Peter Galderisi, making it easy to use alongside the book in a course or as a stand-alone guide to using Stata. Seljan demonstrates how to run commands in Stata for different kinds of research questions and shows the results of the analyses, using lots of annotated screenshots from Stata version 12 (but compatible with all versions, including Stata Small). Students will be guided through standard processes replete with examples and exercises to ready them for future work in political science research. The diverse group of data sets provided include subsamples of both the 2008 and 2012 American National Election Studies, a Eurobarometer survey, single year and longitudinal congressional district files, the 2012 Comparative Congressional Election Study, and a comparative, crossnational country file. Versions with reduced case numbers and variables are also included that are compatible with Stata Small. This manual (and a parallel SPSS manual) are available as stand-alone products or packaged with the textbook Understanding Political Science 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.
Using Stata for Quantitative Analysis by
Using Stata for Quantitative Analysis offers a brief but thorough introduction to analyzing data in undergraduate and graduate level research methods, statistics, and data analysis courses using Stata software. Kyle C. Longest teaches the language of Stata from an intuitive perspective, allowing students with no experience in statistical software to start working with data quickly and complete a basic quantitative research project from start to finish. The Third Edition covers the use of Stata 15 and includes more information on data management and non-linear regression techniques. Enhanced layouts make finding important commands easy.
From a professor of Sociology; covers up to bivariate analysis, integrating data management and other techniques to use Stata (v15) effectively.
Polimetrics by
Polimetrics is an open education resource, licensed CC BY-NC, and designed as a companion to Introduction to Political Science Research Methods, 1st Edition, or IPSRM for short.This workbook provides a tour of the Stata software, an introduction to cross-sectional, time series, and panel data, and an introduction to a variety of models. We review models where the outcome is linear, binary, ordinal, categorical, and count. Additionally, we have an interpretation chapter on survival models.Each "Models" chapter has a similar organizational structure: about, estimated time, what is the model, how are models run in Stata, how do we interpret the model results, and a real-world example of model results in a Creative Commons licensed, peer-reviewed journal article. Additionally, mini-assignment instructions and a rubric are included so students can practice their interpretation skills.
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.
Links to pages and pdfs on a variety of topics, including specific analyses and data management techniques.