How the course works

This is the companion site to the course “Self-Study Course for Stata” created at the University of Göttingen.

Welcome to this Self-Study Course for Stata!

This system will provide you step-by-step with all the material you need for learning how to use Stata. Most of the time, you will have several options how to obtain the information:

1. You can go through the slides and the respective commented do-files, learning the material by self-studying.
2. You can watch a video guiding you through the slides and the code.
3. You can combine both, e.g. working through the material on your own and watching the video on parts which are yet unclear.

In any case, we advise you to type the commands in a do-file and run them yourselves to gain a better understanding of the content.

The course starts with an introduction to Stata and the first chapter should be your starting point if you have never worked with Stata before. Later chapters contain more advanced topics. This course is structured in a modular way. If you work with Stata for the first time, we recommend that you go through the material chapter by chapter. However, if you want to learn about a specific topic, you can pick the respective chapter and look at the material without having to go through all previous chapters.

The chapters are listed in the panel on the left. When you click on the chapter, the sub-chapters are shown. The sections within a chapter can be accessed by clicking on the tabs with the icons at the top (here the i and the group of people).

If you have a question while going through the material, please post your question to the Stud.IP Forum of this course. Others might face the same issue. You will find links to the respective forum topic in nearly all subchapters, mostly in the exercise tab. If you have any comments or feedback regarding the structure or content of this course, please contact the tutors or lecturers listed in the tab Participants.

This is a course by the University of Göttingen. All material provided on this website is exclusively intended for the course and we ask you to not distribute any of the material outside the course.

Working through the exercises

Throughout the course, you can practice what you learned with the provided exercises.

Please try to solve the exercise on your own or with your class mates. Use the provided material, the Stata help-files and web searches for this. Here are some general hints:

Discussing with others how to solve the problems best will be a good practice and help you to see different possible approaches.

Sometimes, you might not know which command to use. Often, just typing "help" and then the name of what you want to do in the command line can be a good solution (e.g. "help reshape"). In other cases, web searches might be helpful, but make sure you don't get lost there.

Also, it might happen that you are stuck and cannot solve a task. Then, try to solve it as far as possible, e.g. by skipping some parts. Only look into the solution after trying to solve the exercise yourself. Often, videos are provided that explain the solution. If you are stuck somewhere, you can watch these videos until the point where you are stuck and then continue again on your own.

The provided solution may differ from your solution. In most cases, this will be fine - as long as the result is the same and your code does what you want it to do, you were successful! There may be different paths to reach the same goal and some paths may be more efficient than others, but efficiency comes with practice.