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Re: st: Re: Your paper on Stata,SAS and SPSS
From
Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To
[email protected], [email protected]
Subject
Re: st: Re: Your paper on Stata,SAS and SPSS
Date
Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:19:20 -0400
At 11:43 AM 8/10/2010, Alan Acock wrote:
John Hall indicates that with the limited math/statistics background
of his students, the "syntax examples I have seen in Stata, . . .
would easily put (them) off." I'm not sure what examples John has
seen. Often those shared on statalist are technical and not
appropriate to beginning students. If you think about a basic
introductory research courses in the social sciences, the actual
Stata commands that would be relevant are vastly simpler than those
used in SPSS or SAS. For SPSS readers who don't appreciate this, here are a few
examples they might compare to the lengthy syntax needed by SPSS
I first used SPSS 30+ years ago -- and I still either cut and paste
syntax, or use the menus, when writing SPSS programs. I can't
remember the syntax to most SPSS estimation commands, partly because
the program is so wildly and unnecessarily inconsistent across
modules. By way of contrast, I hardly ever use the menus in Stata for
estimation commands (although I might use the help files to check out
options, especially for post-estimation commands). I suppose SPSS is
good in that you never have to learn any syntax, but writing syntax
in Stata is far quicker, at least for the most commonly used commands.
-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME: (574)289-5227
EMAIL: [email protected]
WWW: http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
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