Stata

5 Introduction to causal analysis

By now, you will have mastered the basics of Stata. I would call this part descriptive statistics: methods that allow you to summarize your data, to get a general overview about means, standard deviations and distributions. These statistics should be the first part of every serious research as a good description is the foundation of any advanced analysis. The topics in the following chapters will introduce advanced methods that will enable you to test more interesting hypotheses, and make claims about causal relationships. Interestingly, many researchers, and especially those with a background in statistics, often avoid the word “causal” in their papers and rather use terms like “related” or “associated” to describe ...