Free Web Based Tutorials for Learning STATA and SPSS Software

Stata Tutorials

W&L's Guide to Stata

Economics Professor Niels-Hugo Blunch and Leyburn Library's Carol Hansen Karsch's guide to the Stata commands that will get you through Economics 203 and your Capstone project.

Stata Corp.’s Link

http://www.stata.com/links/resources1.html

This is the Stata Corporation’s list of suggested resources for learning Stata.  The company’s top two recommendations, UCLA’s Academic Technology Services and Carolina Population Center Stata Tutorials are described below.

The Stata Project-Oriented Guide,
Roy Mill, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
A series of short tutorials covering the typical steps in a statistical project. The tutorials range from importing data from a spreadsheet to data management.

UCLA’s Academic Technology Services’ Stata Tutorials

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/sk/default.htm

This is an excellent, comprehensive site for beginners through advanced users of Stata. There are movies of an introductory Stata course and associated class notes which summarize the lessons covered in the movie. There are also text based learning modules, with lots of examples and summaries that review the commands covered. A helpful, instructive table offers guidance on the selection of the appropriate statistical technique to use given your data. The lessons are thorough and are written in easy, non-technical language.

For the more experienced Stata user, the site offers 90 minute seminars, some with notes, that cover topics such as: regression, logistic regression, survey data analysis, survival analysis, and program coding.

Carolina Population Center’s Tutorials

http://www.cpc.unc.edu/services/computer/presentations/statatutorial

This site is for knowledgeable  beginners in Stata. There are a series of tutorials, each of which begins with a few lines of Stata code. The user is instructed to type the code into Stata’s command window and then examine the results. Most tutorials then pose questions based on the lesson so that users can gauge their understanding of the material. Answers to the questions follow and additional information related to the covered topics is given. An index of links takes more advanced beginners directly to an area of interest. Advanced tutorials cover: missing values and how to handle them, creating dummy indicator variables, and common errors and how to avoid them.  Survey analysis commands are given special focus.

Princeton’s Stata Tutorial

http://www.princeton.edu/~erp/stata/main.html

Princeton’s Stata tutorial is presented on one long web page. The advantage to this approach is that users can utilize the browser’s FIND command to go directly to a topic of interest. Examples are given but results are not included. The page is a straightforward way to get started for someone comfortable with using statistical packages but who needs help with Stata specifically.

SPSS Tutorials

Many SPSS tutorials, from beginner to advanced, are available on-line. This page, http://pages.infinit.net/rlevesqu/spss.htm, contains a comprehensive, annotated list of some of the possibilities. The UCLA site is recommended as one of the best for learning to navigate SPSS’s menus and its syntax.

UCLA’s Academic Technology Services’ SPSS Tutorials

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/STAT/spss/sk/default.htm

The UCLA site is a great place to get started learning SPSS. It includes links to movies that will help get you going and a link to Texas A&M’s site (http://www.stat.tamu.edu/spss.php ) where additional short movies are available on a variety of beginning and advanced topics. If a text based approach to learning is desired, the UCLA site offers a series of web pages called learning modules that includes SPSS code and output. Tips on avoiding common mistakes are very instructive.  A helpful, instructive table offers guidance on the selection of the appropriate statistical technique to use given your data. The lessons are thorough and are written in easy, non-technical language.