Thanks to everyone for your input on stats books, I'll
look into the various options and hopefully find
something I like. It's also been an interesting
conversation about the state of Stata and SPSS.
Apparently my experience is quite different from
others. All three schools I attended (undergraduate,
masters, PhD) used Stata with the exception of one
course that used SAS. Most of my colleagues in the
sociology, economics, and political science
departments where I now teach also use Stata. My only
exposure to SPSS was to use it to run one analysis not
easily available in Stata 8 (clustering with
user-provided distance matrix, now available in Stata
9). I found that SPSS crashed my computer every time
I used it.
I, too, was originally put off by the Statalist when I
first looked into it. My main issue was the large
volume of emails, many of which were (are still) over
my head and/or about techniques in completely
different disciplines. I took the initiative a few
years ago to create my own Stata user's group with my
fellow graduate students. This email list is only
used sporadically but is a fantastic resource. Not
only is it a place where people can ask very basic
questions, but it has also been a great place to
discuss issues around the datasets and techniques
specific to our discipline. Most of us who have
graduated have continued to stay on the list. For
those of you who teach at universities, especially at
the graduate level, you might encourage your students
to do the same.
Thanks again for your help,
Matissa
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