A Stata Companion to Political Analysis

With a robust statistical package and eye-catching graphics Stata is fast becoming the statistical program of choice for political scientists. For speed, versatility, comprehensiveness, and ease-of-use, Stata is hard to beat. It can be a little daunting for beginning students, but no longer. Philip Pollock's accessible introduction to the program offers students a step-by-step tutorial, leading them through descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation analysis, mean comparisons, linear correlation and regression (including dummy variables and interaction effects), and logistic regression-all tailored to political science material. With over 40 carefully crafted exercises and generous use of annotated screenshots, students will be navigating Stata's graphics routines in no time. Ten feature boxes highlight some of Stata's special capabilities while a concluding chapter provides guidance on how to set up a research project, as well as how to use Stata to read raw data.

Students will be amazed at what they can do as they work through chapters. Graphics capabilities that allow a user to create effective visual displays ranging from elementary but elegant histograms to sophisticated comparisons of logistic regression curves are a major attraction of Stata and are put to effective use in this one-of-a-kind workbook.

Paired with a traditional methods text, this companion volume equips students to analyze real political science research and comes complete with a CD-ROM that includes four customized datasets: two individual-level survey datasets (200 variables from the 2004 National Election Study and 150 variables from the 2002 General Social Survey), and two datasets containing aggregate-level variables on the fifty states and on 114 nations of the world.