Introduction to Stata (Series 2)

Beginners

The course will provide students with an introduction to the popular and powerful statistics package Stata, a program commonly used in both social and natural sciences.

This course is intended for students with very little or no previous experience of Stata.

This module is designed for MPhil and PhD students as part of the Social Science Research Methods Centre (SSRMC) training programme - a shared platform for providing research students with a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research methods skills that are relevant across the social sciences.

• The module requires preferably basic knowledge in statistics (descriptive statistics, linear regression) but it fits for students with no background in statistics.

• You must have a University Information Services (Computing) Desktop Services password (http://www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/linkpages/newcomers)
• You must have enrolled for the module's Moodle course page (instructions: http://www.ssrmc.group.cam.ac.uk/ssrmc-modules/moodle)

Number of sessions: 2

The student will be self-sufficient and able to explore Stata further by themselves in future.

Course attendees will learn how to open and manage their data, produce simple tables and figures, and conduct basic statistical analyses in Stata using the software's statistical language.

Presentation and practicals

Stata Publications: http://www.stata.com/publications/ Stata user’s guide: http://www.stata.com/manuals13/u.pdf Stata YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/user/statacorp

A short online multiple choice assessment hosted on Qualtrics.

All students are expected to give feedback for each module they take...

At the end of each module, students will be sent a link to a very short evaluation form. They will also be able to find this link on the Moodle page for their course. The survey takes a few minutes to fill in, and can even be done on a mobile phone. Students that do not respond to the survey the first time, will receive regular automated reminders until the survey is completed.

Students will not be given certification or proof of attendance for any module for which they have not provided feedback.

• To gain maximum benefits from the course it is important that students do not see this course in isolation from the other MPhil courses or research training they are taking.
• Responsibility lies with each student to consider the potential for their own research using methods common in fields of the social sciences that may seem remote. Ideally this task will be facilitated by integration of the SSRMC with discipline-specific courses in their departments and through reading and discussion.

2 sessions of 4 hours each

Two sessions over two consecutive days