Stata Level Information

To determine your Stata and SurveyCTO skill level, please use the following guidelines: 

Stata Training Prerequisites - [resources here]

Stata 101:

 You have very little or no knowledge of Stata. 

Stata 102:

You have some Stata experience (say in a college class) but would not consider yourself particularly comfortable with the program. You are very familiar with the following concepts:

• Descriptive commands such as summarize, tabulate, and list

• Conditions: if, and (&), and or (|)

• Data manipulation commands such as generate, replace, and drop

 You are likely somewhat familiar with:

• Creating and writing do-files

• Sorting and saving datasets

Topics covered:

• Naming, renaming and labelling variables

  • How do you add details about the variable and its values?

• Variable types

  • String/numeric

• Uniqueness and duplicates

  • How do you identify multiple data points for the same respondent?

• Macros and locals

• Loops

  • Looping over variables OR over values within a variable

• Importing, merging and appending

  • Can we put multiple datasets together, and how?

Stata 103:

You have used Stata for a major school project or in a work environment. You feel comfortable with all basic commands and are very familiar with the following concepts:

• Locals (note: this is absolutely necessary!!)

• The foreach command

• Naming and labelling variables

• Variable types (strings, numerics)

• Importing data through use, merge and append

 You are likely somewhat familiar with:

• Loops using varlist or numlist

• by

• egen

Topics covered:

• Logical expressions and dummy variables

  • What is the difference between generate and egen?

• More loops, macros and tracing

• “IF”: qualifier vs command

  • Suppose you have to tabulate the education of respondents less than 25. Would you use the command, or the qualifier?

• Extensions to manipulations

  • _n, _N, egen

 Stata 104:

This is an advanced, applied, Stata class. You should be quite comfortable using Stata. You are very familiar with the following concepts:

• Loops with varlist and numlist, as well as while loops

• The if command (distinct from the if qualifier)

• _N and _n

• by

• egen

You are likely somewhat familiar with:

• capture and assert

• Saved results such as r(N), r(levels)

Topics covered:

• Accessing saved results from operations and manipulations

• Recoding variables

  • What do the rules (1=2) (2=1) specify?

• Checking for logical consistencies in data

  • What command(s) would you use to check skip patterns in your survey?

• Cleaning strings

• Other data checks

  • How do you find all variables with negative values using a loop?

Note: If you are struggling between two levels , it is suggested you start at the lower level. The trainings are flexible, and it is easy to move up quickly after an initial session.

SurveyCTO Training Prerequisites - [free course here]

Topics covered:

• Components of SCTO - the server, collection app and desktop app

  • Which of the three do your enumerators use while conducting surveys?

• Designing a form

  • Introduction to SCTO syntax

    • What is a field? Or a constraint?

  • Web platform vs XLS form

  • Programming questions using both

    • How do you differentiate between open-ended and choice-based questions?

    • How do you reference a previous response?

• Filling out a form, saving it, and finalizing it

  • Can you edit a form once it is finalized?

• Downloading survey data from the server

• Importing data to STATA