From the last posts in this series, you should feel comfortable using Stata’s data editor, changing values and types, and creating new variables.
We’ll now teach you to make your variables more approachable by adding labels.
The image below shows label information for the foreign variable.
Once you’ve imported, examined, and cleaned your data, a common next step would be to make some visual displays or graphs. In this article we’ll go over the details of creating, naming, saving, and exporting graphs in Stata.
We will do all of this using syntax, rather than Stata’s “Graphics” menu. If you want a quick lesson on using the menus to make graphs in Stata, check out this article. (more…)
There are not a lot of statistical methods designed just for ordinal variables. (There are a few, though.) 
But that doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with few options. There are more than you’d think. (more…)
A normal probability plot is extremely useful for checking normality assumptions. It’s more precise than a histogram, which can’t pick up subtle deviations. And yet it doesn’t suffer from too much power from large samples with tiny departures from normality or too little power from small samples with large departures from normality, as do tests like Shaprio-Wilkes.
The biggest problem with a normal probability plot is that it’s hard to read, especially if you’re not used to them. So let’s take a moment and walk through exactly how they work and what they tell you.
There are two versions of normal probability plot: Q-Q and P-P. I’ll start with the Q-Q. (more…)
From the last post in this series, you should know how to change between numeric types and easily change numeric data. We’ll now expand your type-changing skills to include changing string variables with two new commands. (more…)
From our last posts in this series, you should be comfortable with how Stata handles data editing, as well as with making your own variables. In this post, we’ll talk about commands that edit the content or storage type of your variables in Stata: recode and recast. Let’s start off with the recode command.