3 Cleaning and preparing data
As you are familiar with the basic steps for working with Stata, we will focus on real data editing and work through some examples. In this chapter, we will start to prepare data. Over time you will see that running actual statistical methods is often done very quickly, yet cleaning and preparing data, so you can use it for your desired methods, will take the lion’s share of your time.
3.1 Getting to know your data
Suppose you get a new dataset for the very first time, maybe from your colleagues, a research institute or a government agency. In the best case, there exists information about how the data was collected, generated and processed. Then it is a great idea to first study these documents, so you know what ...
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