posts tagged “Stata”

R presents more of a challenge to Stata on many fronts, one of which is basic data management.

I often find myself calculating the value of one observation given the value of an adjacent value. For example, to assess a lagged effect, I would take the value of the preceding interval. Stata makes this really easy, R not so much.

Here's what we would do in Stata:

set obs 1000
gen i = _n
gen val = round(runiform()*10)
gen lag = val[_n-1]

The last command throws the warning, (1 missing value generated) because the first observation has no lagged observation. The first 10 observations ...

Over the weekend, jeremy posted about beckieball, a "new sport sweeping the country." The purpose was to show how selection on characteristics affects the correlation between characteristics upon selection. This, as commenter Stuart Buck pointed out, is an example of Berkson's Paradox, though it relates to jeremy's post about height and nba.

Although he left several other exercises to the reader, I thought I would do a simpler one: recreate the code that he used to make his example. I did this a) because it was a semi-useful way to shake the cobwebs from egg nog and yuletides, and b) because I think that it will come ...

While writing scripts is one of the most important skills for reproducible quantitative sociology, the typical convention is to pick up the skills through more experienced colleagues in graduate school or at the workplace. Below are a few tips that I have learned from others, picked up on my own, or otherwise accumulated in my arsenal of tricks that I thought that I would pass along. There are great resources out there, but I thought it would be helpful to pass along what I think are the most important and helpful tips.

  1. Include a brief header in all scripts indicating the name of the file, the creator, and a brief ...

Programming in Stata is relatively straightforward and this is partly because the programming syntax is both powerful and relatively straightforward. There are, however, a few minor annoyances in Stata's language including using the backtick and apostrophe to indicate local macros (i.e.,`localname'). Among these shortcomings, I would argue that the lack of anything like a list in Stata's language is one of the largest.

In most langauges, you can store a list of items and refer to the item in the list by some sort of index. This is particularly helpful for iterating over the same step multiple times. Lists generally come in two flavors: lists to which you ...

I have come across a problem several times that has been relatively frustrating to deal with. I have data that is downloaded from a site (specifically the Census (which is why this comes up consistently) in which the first two lines of the data contain the variable name and variable description respectively. This is incredibly useful for documenting data. Rather than attempting to figure out what variable pct001001 means, the description of the variable is right there.

The problem with data in this format is that Stata imports variables as string variables with the first observation being the variable description. I could pull the first two lines of the data ...

At Orgtheory, Fabio asked about how to identify substrings within text fields in Stata. Although this is a seemingly simple proposal, there is one big problem, as Gabriel Rossman points out: Stata string fields can only hold 244 characters of text. As Fabio desires to use this field to analyze scientific abstracts, then 244 characters is obviously insufficient.

Gabriel Rossman has posted a solution he has called grepmerge that uses the Linux-based program grep to search for strings in files. This is a great solution, but it comes with one large caveat: it cannot be used in a native Windows environment. This is because the grep command ...