Re: st: Stata vs SPSS

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 10:35 AM 10/16/2006, Raphael Fraser wrote:
> On 10/15/06, Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu> wrote:
> > However, I suspect that isn't the kind of thing your students were
> > complaining about!  Who are these people, what is the field of study,
> > what sorts of things are they going to need to do in their future
> > careers?
> These are graduate students majoring in Nutrition or Epidemiology.
> They are being trained primarily for academic research. They are going
> to be expected to perform simple statistical analyses (t-test, etc.)
> and data manipulation.
Oh.  Well, in that case you should be using SPSS.  :)

Actually, while I was drawn to Stata because of its more advanced 
capabilities, I think it is very good for more basic things as 
well.  In fact, there are some simple things I never could figure out 
how to do in SPSS, but in Stata they were easy.  If it helps any, my 
"Stata Highlights" page shows how various simple things can easily be 
done in Stata:

http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/stats1/StataHighlights.html

That reminds me - to the list of things I like about Stata, I'll add 
the immediate commands.  Quite handy for checking homework answers, 
if nothing else, and may be useful for real-world problems as well.


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Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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