Richard Goldstein <[email protected]> on behalf of Alan Acock:
> We are considering switching from SPSS to Stata as our primary software
> package for training graduate students. Can anybody tell me the
> limitations/strengths of Stata for data management compared to SPSS. I'm
> interested in merging many datasets and in constructing variables,
> counts,
> means, etc. SPSS' count command and mean.n command are very useful. Does
> Stata have an equivalent?
Stata has two (and maybe a third) disadvantages wrt SPSS:
1: SPSS's windowing interface is actually really very good, for whatever
that's worth
2: SPSS works through the data set a case at a time, so it doesn't
have the limitation that things get radically slower when you run
out of RAM, and maybe
3: depending on the discipline, it just has the installed-base
advantage (certainly in sociology).
On the other hand, Stata's data handling, statistical capabilities
and programmability are *way* ahead of SPSS's.
Unless your graduate students are not likely to use any stats
package very often in the future (in which case SPSS's real initial
ease of use will trump) Stata is clearly superior.
Brendan
--
Brendan Halpin, Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-390476; Room F2-025 x 3147
<mailto:[email protected]> <http://wivenhoe.staff8.ul.ie/~brendan>
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