Data Management Using Stata: A Practical Handbook 2nd Edition

Anyone new to research and analysis can quickly become disenchanted with the whole enterprise when they realize that the data you encounter in the real world looks nothing like the clean, tidy, well-documented data you use in school. You can spend hours, days, months of your life desperately searching resources for how to process, clean and transform your data. Stata offers great documentation, but it's overwhelming for someone new to Stata. And for even an intermediate researcher, sometimes it's difficult to formulate questions when you don't know what's even possible. Enter Data Management by Michael Mitchell. This book offers a clear path out of the wilderness for 99% of the data management problems you'll be faced with (at least in medical research). Mitchelll takes you from the baby steps of importing raw data files to the giant leaps of writing your own programs for complex data management tasks. The book can be used as a powerful reference, but can also be worked through chapter by chapter (it took me 6 months), example by example. By the end of the book, you'll be comfortable programming for loops, performing complex merges, subsetting your data, transforming your data and much much more. These are the requisite skills you'll need to know to deal with data as a researcher. This is the best book I've found that explains these often complex tasks in clear, easy to follow instructions. Buy this book, do the exercises and you will get this time back several times over with how efficient your Stata coding will become!