Dates & fees for 2011 will
be posted here as soon as they are confirmed. Please check periodically
for updates.
Course outline
The course will be held in central London at the London School of Hygiene
& Tropical Medicine and will run from 12 - 16 July 2010. The
day starts at 9.30am and finishes at 5.30pm. On Monday the day will
start later at 10:30am and Friday finish earlier at 4:30pm.
The aim of the course is to teach competent Stata users the techniques that
allow you to get the most out of Stata and speed up the output of your work.
As well as being a powerful tool for statistical analysis, Stata offers a variety
of commands for manipulating your data and for formatting, arranging and exporting your results.
The course is aimed at researchers and other professionals, from any discipline,
who regularly use Stata for analysis but want to learn how to work more efficiently.
It would be particularly suited to those who are about to embark on large analyses and who
would like a quick guide on how to automate the repetitive parts of the process.
The course is taught by research staff from the Centre for Population Studies,
who regularly use Stata for large-scale analyses using multiple data sources. The examples
used in the course are drawn from the background of the tutors and are, therefore, from the
population and health sciences. However, none require any specialist knowledge of the field.
Much of the material in the course has been developed with students and staff from the
UK and overseas. Most teaching is hands-on, using Stata to tackle a series of exercises designed
to illustrate the use of particular commands in order to solve a variety of problems.
These exercises are supplemented by short lectures and a very comprehensive set of notes.
There is a strong emphasis throughout on providing information that can be built on to tackle
new problems and to be applied in different situations.
We use Stata 11 in a Windows environment; users of other operating
systems should note that, although almost everything is the same, there
are some differences between operating systems and these are not covered
in the course.
Who Should Attend
The course is designed for people who want to be more efficient in
their use of Stata. Those who are already experienced in using Stata
for data analysis will benefit most from the course. As a minimum, you
should be able to use Stata for an analysis of some sort (linear regression,
for example) generate, recode and label variables, and be comfortable
writing comprehensive do files.
If you are already familiar with the merge, collapse, reshape and append commands,
have used foreach or forvalues loops and can understand a simple Stata program,
then this course may be too basic for you.
If, on the other hand, none of that sounds familiar,
then this could be exactly what you need!
If you have any doubt about whether the course would be suitable for you,
please do get in touch with the organisers who will be able to advise you further.
Applicants should have a good command of English.
Course Content
The course can be divided broadly into three sections:
Data handling and manipulation
Stata has some powerful but simple commands for managing and manipulating data.
We cover the commands needed to combine data from different datasets (appending and merging)
and to rearrange data from wide format to long format. We will also cover searching for
duplicate records, and managing these, reordering the variables in the dataset, generating summary
variables and summary datasets.
Accessing and outputting results
One of the commonest complaints about Stata is the difficulty of producing
well-formatted results output. The output on the screen typically contains more detail than
is required, and the formatting is often sub-standard. Cutting and pasting is tedious when
there are many results to present and inefficient when analyses have to be repeated.
It is possible to automatically output well formatted, concise and relevant results from Stata.
You can set up do files which write the results you want to the screen, or external files,
in the required format. These results files can then be automatically updated each time the
analysis is repeated. There are several ways to do this using either additional user-written
Stata commands or with some simple programming. This course introduces both approaches.
Programming Stata
Data cleaning, data management and the initial stages of many analyses
can be repetitive and time consuming. Many of these repetitive tasks
can be automated in Stata, which not only speeds up the process but
also reduces the chances of making an error. We cover the use of basic
programming techniques to assist you in quickly and efficiently carrying
out repetitive tasks.
Aims & Objectives
By the end of the course you should be able to:
1. Generate variables that contain summaries of the data
2. Create a summary dataset using collapse
3. Navigate a dataset using _n, _N and subscripted variables
4. Rearrange a dataset using reshape
5. Combine multiple datasets using merge and append
6. Identify duplicate observations
7. Export data to a spreadsheet
8. Create tailor-made publication quality graphs
9. Understand what macros and scalars are
10. Be able to use foreach and forvalues loops
11. Understand and use if statements
12. Understand how Stata stores estimation results
13. Be able to access and use stored estimation results
14. Know how to export results using user-written commands: estout,
outreg, tabout
15. Understand how Stata programs work
16. Be able to write and use a simple Stata program
17. Be able to write a do-file which exports results using file write
Methods of Assessment
None. There will be an opportunity on the last afternoon for students
to practice with their own datasets. A certificate of attendance will
be provided on completion of the course.
Course Fee
The fee for the course is £945 which includes instruction
and refreshments, it does not include lunch, accommodation or travel.
The full fee must be available by 4 June 2010.
Accommodation & Meals
Unfortunately, we are not able to arrange travel and accommodation
for course participants. However, a list of local hotels and student
accommodation is available from Registry
.
Lunch can be purchased from the School refectory. Evening meals are
not catered for at the School, but there is a large choice of restaurants
and coffee shops nearby.
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is committed to
improve global health through its programme of short and full-time postgraduate
study.
For the course leaflet, please click
here.
Please return a completed application
form, along with an equal
opportunities form to:
Registry, LSHTM, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B
3DP, UK, Tel: +44 (0)20 7299 4648
Alternatively, by fax:
Fax: +44 (0)20 7323 0638
Or email: shortcourses@lshtm.ac.uk
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