ISSR Methodology Workshop | Using Stata for Cleaning and Merging Datasets (Online)

Instructor: Ricardo Salas Díaz

Stata is a statistics software broadly used for social analysis. A fundamental but time-consuming and sometimes excruciating part of the research process is to clean the datasets. This workshop provides a basic toolkit to clean and manage datasets in Stata. In the first hour of the workshop, we will go through several commands and techniques to identify and correct missing data, outliers, and very likely mistakes in a dataset. We will discuss the trade-off between keeping and erasing these data points. In the second hour of the workshop, the participants will learn the use of the commands "merge" and "append" and some basic techniques to do a fuzzy (using text/string variables) "merge".

Please note that the course will use Stata for PC. A few commands and functionalities differ in Stata for Mac, but Mac users are also encouraged to attend the workshop. See information on how to obtain STATA under ‘Stata for students’ in the following link: https://www.umass.edu/it/support/software/stata-data-analysis-statistical-software

Previous statistical analysis in Stata is not required, but familiarity with the environment is highly preferred.

ISSR Methodology Consultants are generously supported by the Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.