For further information, it has just been drawn to my attention that
SPSS 14 (released August 2005) will read and write STATA data files:
http://www.spss.com/spss/whats_new.htm
Alasdair.
Dr Alasdair Crockett
Chief Research Officer
Institute for Social and Economic Research
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
Essex
C04 3SQ
-----Original Message-----
From: Alasdair Crockett [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 12 October 2005 15:23
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: Free SPSS to STATA dataset conversion utility
Hi,
I have written an SPSS to STATA dataset conversion utility as an
offshoot of my work for the UK Data Archive. This is free to download
and pass onto others. Please let me know if you find any bugs or improve
it in any way.
It is written in Sax Basic (a Visual Basic for Applications interface
that ships with SPSS). It can be downloaded here:
http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/support/tools.asp
The documentation file gives you all the details about how to run it and
what it does. It requires both SPSS and STATA (for Windows) to be
installed or accessible via a networked drive, but does not require any
knowledge of either package to run it.
Please note I am not a programmer so the code is not particularly
elegant. It does the job though. It will convert the entire dataset:
data, variable labels, value labels, user missing values, with no loss
of precision (Stata doubles are used where necessary). Where labels or
string variables are truncated or lost (since Stata limits are generally
more restrictive than SPSS), these are documented in an rtf (rich text
format) file. Also generated is a codebook/data dictionary, which
presents information relevant to the dataset in both SPSS and Stata
format (such that, for example, you can see that -9 in SPSS equates to
.a in Stata).
Please note the disclaimer though, and always check the end results.
This script is intended for those without access to StatTransfer.
Regards,
Alasdair.
Dr Alasdair Crockett
Chief Research Officer
Institute for Social and Economic Research
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
Essex
C04 3SQ
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
