I missed this thread, but I would like to give you my belated opinion.
Now I can tell you are right, Stata seems a far more superior statistical software that SPSS. *But* it depends on what you do.
I started as a SPSS user (version 13). It was not dependent on me (I am not a statistician, rather a researcher in innovation management), but on the software used by colleagues from which I could get some statistical advice. When I needed to do regressions with panel data, I moved to Stata (version 9). But on rare occasions I *go back* to SPSS. I think that the latter has a multivariate section which is at least as good as, and sometimes better than Stata. I am talking about (multiple) correspondence analysis, multidimensional scaling, post-hoc tests (e.g. Sidak, Scheffe, Ducan, S-N-K, etc...) and measures of associations (e.g. Phi, Cramér's V, eta, Cochran's and Mantel-Haenszel statistics, etc...).
Nicola
P.S. I'll NOT receive/read any email but the Digest.
At 02.33 19/07/2009 -0400, you wrote:
>Dear Statalisters,
>
>I'm working as a research analyst in public health since 1990. I've always
>used Spss for my statistical analysis (the current version I have is the
>outdated 12.1 release). I always work with the Spss syntax language, almost
>never with the GUI (maybe one or two times a year).
>
>Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to take a look at an evaluation
>copy of Stata 10. Although I'm not a statistician, it seems to me that
>Stata is a far more superior statistical software that Spss. One of the
>things I like about Stata, it's that Stata is a "complete package"
>relatively to the Spss base software (well, it's true that it is now known
>as PASW ...). In order to get with Spss what Stata offers, one has to buy
>rather expensive add-on modules. One of the features I like the most about
>Stata, is the possibility to analyse data from complex surveys (like the
>Canadian Community Health Surveys - CCHS). It's not possible to do that
>with the Spss base version. Stata also appears to me to have a much better
>online help and documentation. And, to the say the least, the Stata support
>staff is terrific.
>
>In my humble opinion, the only advantage I see in Spss over Stata is that
>the Spss output is nicer than Stata's. It's easy to edit an Spss output
>(insert a title for example) and distribute it as an PDF file to those who
>haven't Spss installed on their computer.
>
>I'm particulary interested to hear about the experience of former strong
>Spss users who decided to switch to Stata. Beside the fact Stata has much
>more statistical procedures, is more powerful, and is much less expensive
>to buy (as we don't have to purchase add-on modules to get "a complete set"
>of statistical procedures), for what reasons did you decide to do so ? I
>would be very grateful if you could give me a few reasons that could help
>me to convince the administration department here to purchase Stata instead
>of the next release of Spss (version 18.0)
>
>Thank you very much.
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