Re: st: why STATA

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@nd.edu>]

At 12:12 AM 10/31/2003 +0600, you wrote:
> Dear all,
>
>
>         Can any one give me an idea why Stata should be preferred for
> analyzing all sort of survey data?
>         What are its superiority to other available packages?
>
>         Any response / comments will be appreciated.
>         Thank you.
I have been an SPSS user for 27 years and so long as SPSS can continue to 
do most of what I want, I probably won't drop it as my primary 
package.  Nonetheless, I occasionally wander over to Stata, and I can see 
some real appeal to it.

* Spss has 50 routines which seem to have been written by 50 different 
people each of whom had their own unique ideas about what syntax and 
features should be like.  Stata is far more internally consistent in its 
commands.  (I do like SPSS's help and user interface better than Stata's; 
on the other hand, SPSS has to be better because there is no way anybody 
could remember all of the wildly differing syntax across commands.)

* I've barely scratched the surface of what Stata can do with graphs, but I 
like what I've seen.  An example can be found at 
http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/xsoc593/lectures/l11c.pdf.  Awfully simple 
stuff, I know, but I find it quite helpful and I don't know how to easily 
do it in SPSS.

* Hamilton's book on Statistics with Stata is wonderful.  It seems like 
every corresponding SPSS book I have ever seen stops with pretty basic 
material.  Hamilton covers both basic and advanced topics.  I have this 
strong urge just to steal and covert all his examples and write a book 
called Statistics with SPSS.  I figure I could get by with it, as no 
self-respecting Stata person would ever admit they had read an SPSS book.

* I love Spss's data base manipulation features although I've heard claims 
that Stata is also very good.  But of course, it is fairly easy to move 
data from one package to another.  One of my colleagues says "Use SPSS for 
recodes; use Stata for everything else."

* Stata seems faster than SPSS, at least for some tasks.  I suspect that is 
because it stores so much in memory.  On the other hand, I have some data 
sets that are so monstrous, I can't get them to work in Stata even though 
SPSS can slowly but surely tackle them (I use version 7, I don't know if 8 
is any different).



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