Introduction to Stata
Instructors: Oliver Lipps & Ursina Kuhn
Modality: Online
Preliminary workshop: 06 - 07 August 2026
Workshop contents and objectives
This online workshop is an introduction to the Stata software for researchers who use Stata for their analyses or for a course using Stata at the Lugano Summer School. Participants will get to know the Stata Interface and learn to write Stata syntax for data preparation and analysis.
Workshop design
We will use presentation slides, demonstrate prepared examples in Stata, and use hands-on exercises. Each day, we plan to have approx. 4 presentations and exercise sessions. To stimulate exchange, the exercises will be organized in breakout sessions with time to discuss questions and best practices.
Detailed lecture plan (daily schedule)
Day 1.
Morning: we will present the Stata environment, starting with clicking in drop-down menus. Then we will switch to use syntax for reproducibility, transparency and efficiency, starting with the set-up of a Stata program. We will also address the usefulness of AI tools.
Afternoon: variable exploration and data management, such as subsetting data sets, or creating, removing, and recoding variables. We will look at how Stata treats missing data and variable and value labels.
Day 2.
Morning: more advanced data preparation practices, such as using loops, local and global macros, observation subscripts _n and _N, and lagged values. Furthermore, we will show how to combine information from different data files using merge and append.
Afternoon: working with strings, wide and long data formats. We will show basic modeling (notably regression) and create graphs, although we will not go into much detail about these aspects. There will also be room for questions and discussions.
Class materials
- The compendia “Stata Basics” and “Stata Data Management”, written by the instructors, provide an introduction, give an overview of the most important commands, and example syntax.
- Prepared student data sets with exercises based on data from the Swiss Household Panel.
Prerequisites
- PC / laptop with Stata (preferably version 17 or higher) installed (can be a 1 week trial version)
- Participants should have minimal experience with quantitative statistics and have already worked with other software used in quantitative social sciences, such as SPSS, SAS, or R
Ursina Kuhn
FORS and member of the Swiss Household Panel team
Ursina Kuhn is a senior researcher at FORS and the Swiss Household Panel.
After a PhD in political science on voting behavior she worked and led research projects in different disciples of social science, such as sociology, economics, political science and methods of panel data. She has a long experience of collecting, preparing and analyzing data of the Swiss Household Panel, but has also experience using other panel surveys and administrative data.
Oliver Lipps
FORS and University of Bern, Switzerland
He is a survey methodologist at FORS, Lausanne, and member of the Swiss Household Panel team. In addition, he is a lecturer in survey methodology and survey research at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern.
His main research interests are nonresponse in cross-sectional surveys and attrition in panel surveys, panel data analysis, as well as causality in social science research. His research includes social inequality issues in different substantive topics such as the labor market, health, or education.