Study design and data analysis form the two core components of any quantitative study. A great amount of effort is put into collecting data; however, all the effort goes wasted if the right tools are not employed during the analysis stage. With the advancement of technology, manual analysis is almost completely phased out and one of the first steps involved in data analysis is choosing the right software for the process. Several statistical packages are available to student researchers today. But, Stata seems to popular among these.
Stata is integrated all-inclusive statistical software that works well on Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix and other computers. As of 2012, Stata was one of the favored statistical software used by Biologists and Social Scientists.
Some of the advantages of using Stata for help with your data analysis include:
• Accurate and user friendly: The point and click interface and easy to understand syntax makes this software easy to learn and use for even the most amateur scientist. Moreover, the manufacturers boast of FDA compliance certificate, which ensures that the results obtained are accurate and reproducible.
• Comprehensive Data Management service: Data management is one of the most underrated processes in a scientific research. Stata does not stop at just analyzing the data but provides users with all inclusive data management software. The software comes with various features by which you can manage your variables, groups, placebos, etc. better. It is considered as the best in class for longitudinal studies and multi imputation data.
• High quality graphical analysis: While many other softwares provide graphical tools, the ones generated by Stata are easily the best and can be considered “publication quality.” One can even create their own style of personalized graphs with multiple variables in the same figure.
• Multi platform compatibility: As mentioned earlier, Stata can easily be downloaded in all types of processors and the user License works well across the platforms. Apart from this unlike other softwares, one can export or import data between the platforms and even import statistical data processed in other softwares.
• Widespread user base: Stata is one of the widely used statistical software package and is available in over 200 countries with global technical support. For researchers conducting multi-location studies, this is a major advantage to state in sync.
However, the most important advantage, especially for young scholars is the fact that Stata is one of the most affordable software packages available.
