Subject: Re: st: Switching from SPSS to Stata

["P. Rao Sahib" <p.rao.sahib@rug.nl>]

Last year together with a few colleagues, we were able to convince our 
faculty to invest in a lab license for students for STATA. If you would 
like to garner support for STATA, I would mention the rich on-line 
resources (the entire STATA manual is online), the active online 
community and the large number of user written routines.  In my view, 
the estimation methods that are proposed in journal articles are very 
quickly implemented in STATA. You could mention that STATA allows you to 
use the most recent estimation methods developed. Also, SPSS does not 
come anywhere near STATA regarding the routines available for panel data.
 
To get others interested, you could organize an informal introduction to 
STATA, you could either give this yourself or ask if the local provider 
of STATA could do so. We wrote a letter to our administrative unit and 
got a few colleagues to sign it as well. I would also recommend getting 
a subscription to the STATA journal.

Dr. Padma Rao Sahib
Faculty of Economics and Business
University of Groningen
Groningen,  The Netherlands
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