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AW: st: Re: Your paper on Stata,SAS and SPSS


From   "Martin Weiss" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   AW: st: Re: Your paper on Stata,SAS and SPSS
Date   Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:58:53 +0200

<> 


" I don't have Stata installed and don't want to download a trial version 
until I have time to do it justice."


I do not think that there is such a thing as a "trial version" for Stata.
You need to know someone to make it happen:
http://www.stata.com/customerservice/borrow.html




HTH
Martin

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von John F Hall
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 11. August 2010 15:56
An: Statalist
Cc: [email protected]; Bruce Weaver
Betreff: Re: st: Re: Your paper on Stata,SAS and SPSS

Alan

Thanks for this: very helpful.

Not sure about Poisson distributions (my course went 11 weeks before 
touching t-test or chi-sq) but the reversing command looks neat.  I have the

exact same situation in one of my tutorials constructing simple attitude 
scales (from a survey of 15- and 16- year olds) to measure "attachment to 
status quo" and "sexism" from a list of items some of which need to be 
reverse coded, but there's also a lengthy narrative explaining what I'm 
doing and why, and also warnings of missing data (with COUNT) advice on 
giving scales a true zero point (with COMPUTE) and the dangers with RECODE 
if you're not careful, especially if you save the working file without 
keeping a copy of the original.

[7-hour interlude here as a digger looking for a mains water leak went 
through the phone cable, but at least France Telecom came the same day to 
fix it.  As soon as I've filled the whole back in, I'll scout round for some

examples of Stata output]

You can see the sequence and contents of my SPSS tutorials on 
http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/spsspasw-18-tutorial-guide.html : all the 
main menus are displayed in the left pane on the site.

I don't have Stata installed and don't want to download a trial version 
until I have time to do it justice.

John Hall
http://surveyresearch.weebly.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Alan Acock
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected] ; Bruce Weaver
Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: st: Re: Your paper on Stata,SAS and SPSS



On Aug 10, 2010, at Tue Aug 5 12:48 , John F Hall wrote:
> Alan
>
> I only joined the list two days ago, so I haven't had a chance to find 
> much Stata syntax to set alongside SPSS.  Listers have sent one or two 
> one-liners, but with no accompanying output examples.
> I'm talking about reading from a raw data matrix, adding variable and 
> value labels, declaring missing values, data transformations, index 
> construction and the like (possibly via correlation) followed by simple 
> analysis like frequency counts, barcharts and contingency tables using %%,

> not fancy multivariate inferential statistics.  Had I still been teaching,

> that would have come much later in my course, but far too late for the 
> survey report that had to be on the client's desk by yesterday.
> You're welcome to download data sets and tutorials from my site and offer 
> Stata examples to set alongside the SPSS syntax and output (no GUI for me:

> far too cumbersome, complex and tiresome).
> John Hall
> http://surveyresearch.weebly.com

John,

To read the following you should have a fixed font, e.g., courier, and may 
have some problems if your email system raps lines around.

I sent one line commands because that is how simple the syntax is. Here is a

complete program. The dataset is installed on your PC when you install 
Stata. It is called auto.dta.

Here is the entire program:
********begin*********
sysuse auto
tab foreign
fre foreign
ttest mpg, by(foreign)
tab rep78 foreign, col chi2 V
pwcorr weight trunk headroom length price, obs sig
regress price weight trunk headroom length, beta
********end***********

Let me elaborate.

The sysuse auto installs the sample datasets that come with the Stata 
program.
The tab foreign does a frequency distribution--
==========
. tab foreign

  Car type |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
  Domestic |         52       70.27       70.27
   Foreign |         22       29.73      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
     Total |         74      100.00
==========

I prefer the frequency distribution output that SPSS has. A user wrote a 
command, fre, that does this. From the Stata command line you can say findit

fre and follow the link to install it (with one click). Here is what you get

with that command: As an SPSS person you probably also prefer this output
===========
. fre foreign

foreign -- Car type
----------------------------------------------------------------
                  |      Freq.    Percent      Valid       Cum.
-------------------+--------------------------------------------
Valid   0 Domestic |         52      70.27      70.27      70.27
       1 Foreign  |         22      29.73      29.73     100.00
       Total      |         74     100.00     100.00
---------------------------------------------------------------
===========

As an example of an independent t-test you may want to know if price is 
significantly different depending on whether the car is domestic (U.S.) or 
foreign (not U.S.). The ttest command gives you this
===========
. ttest mpg, by(foreign)

Two-sample t test with equal variances
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
  Group |     Obs        Mean    Std. Err.   Std. Dev.   [95% Conf. 
Interval]
---------+------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Domestic |      52    19.82692     .657777    4.743297    18.50638 
21.14747
Foreign |      22    24.77273     1.40951    6.611187    21.84149 
27.70396
---------+------------------------------------------------------------------
--
combined |      74     21.2973    .6725511    5.785503     19.9569 
22.63769
---------+------------------------------------------------------------------
--
   diff |           -4.945804 
 1.362162               -7.661225   -2.230384
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
   diff = mean(Domestic) - mean(Foreign)                         t 
  -3.6308
Ho: diff = 0                                     degrees of freedom = 
72

   Ha: diff < 0                 Ha: diff != 0                 Ha: diff > 0
Pr(T < t) = 0.0003         Pr(|T| > |t|) = 0.0005          Pr(T > t) = 
0.9997

In order to do a what SPSS calls a crosstabulation of two variables and get 
a chi-square test and Cramer's V
you use the next one line command:
===========

. tab rep78 foreign, col chi2 V

+-------------------+
| Key               |
|-------------------|
|     frequency     |
| column percentage |
+-------------------+

   Repair |
   Record |       Car type
     1978 |  Domestic    Foreign |     Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
        1 |         2          0 |         2
          |      4.17       0.00 |      2.90
-----------+----------------------+----------
        2 |         8          0 |         8
          |     16.67       0.00 |     11.59
-----------+----------------------+----------
        3 |        27          3 |        30
          |     56.25      14.29 |     43.48
-----------+----------------------+----------
        4 |         9          9 |        18
          |     18.75      42.86 |     26.09
-----------+----------------------+----------
        5 |         2          9 |        11
          |      4.17      42.86 |     15.94
-----------+----------------------+----------
    Total |        48         21 |        69
          |    100.00     100.00 |    100.00

         Pearson chi2(4) =  27.2640   Pr = 0.000
              Cramér's V =   0.6286
==============

If you want a correlation matrix with the pairwise N and the level of 
significance you use the next line
==============
. pwcorr weight trunk headroom length price, obs sig

            |   weight    trunk headroom   length    price
-------------+---------------------------------------------
     weight |   1.0000
            |
            |       74
            |
      trunk |   0.6722   1.0000
            |   0.0000
            |       74       74
            |
   headroom |   0.4835   0.6620   1.0000
            |   0.0000   0.0000
            |       74       74       74
            |
     length |   0.9460   0.7266   0.5163   1.0000
            |   0.0000   0.0000   0.0000
            |       74       74       74       74
            |
      price |   0.5386   0.3143   0.1145   0.4318   1.0000
            |   0.0000   0.0064   0.3313   0.0001
            |       74       74       74       74       74
==============

If you want to do a simple multiple regression and get R-square, B's, 
beta's, etc.
==============
. regress price weight trunk headroom length, beta

     Source |       SS       df       MS              Number of obs = 
74
-------------+------------------------------           F(  4,    69) = 
10.20
      Model |   236016580     4    59004145           Prob > F      = 
0.0000
   Residual |   399048816    69  5783316.17           R-squared     = 
0.3716
-------------+------------------------------           Adj R-squared = 
0.3352
      Total |   635065396    73  8699525.97           Root MSE      = 
2404.9

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
      price |      Coef.   Std. Err.      t    P>|t| 
Beta
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------
--
     weight |   4.753066   1.120054     4.24   0.000 
1.252435
      trunk |   114.0859   109.9488     1.04   0.303 
.1654491
   headroom |  -711.5679   445.0204    -1.60 
        -.2040968
     length |  -101.7092   42.12534    -2.41 
        -.7678236
      _cons |   11488.47   4543.902     2.53   0.014 
.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

==============

All of these are very basic commands for a beginning course. Stata has menus

where you can point and click, but you can see why many users don't bother 
with these. In my book on Stata I reproduce most of the sorts of commands 
you cover in your tutorials. The fact that you make these available at no 
charge for SPSS people is very nice of you.

There are some areas where SPSS has an advantage. People doing traditional 
ANOVA find SPSS easier to use, for example. As far as data management goes 
it is a mixed thing. I work with some complex datasets so the added power of

Stata is important for data management. Michael Mitchell has a great book on

data management (Stata Press). Stata does use the two step process of 
labeling variables and some find this awkward. The advantage is that the 
same value labels, once defined in step one, can be applied broadly to 
appropriate variables.

The extensibility of Stata by users is remarkable. Some of what you see on 
Statalist is the code they wrote and this can be complicated even though the

command is simple. For example, a user wrote a command revrs.
If I say revrs varlist (after installing the command the first time), Stata 
will reverse code each of the variables and reassign the value labels for 
them, then generate new variables with rev at the start while keeping the 
original variables unchanged. Some of these user written commands are 
extremely powerful. Scott Long, also a sociologist, wrote a one line command

that runs a Poisson regression, a negative binomial regression, a zero 
inflated Poisson regression, and a zero inflated Negative Binomial 
regression. The output includes the results for each of these and a table 
helping you decide which model fits the data best. This would not be of much

use for a beginning student, but illustrates the power of the extensibility 
of Stata.

Michael mentioned the price difference and it is really dramatic. When you 
buy (not lease) Stata you get everything. The price is not an annual fee.

Many people still use SPSS and I hope IBM invests enough to make it a more 
competitive product for social science researchers. I'm concerned that their

primary interest may be in the predictive analytics applications for 
marketing researchers, but I hope this is a mistaken concern.

--alan
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