A Gentle Introduction to Stata, Sixth Edition is for people who need to learn Stata but who may not have a strong background in statistics or prior experience with statistical software packages. After working through this book, you will be able to enter, build, and manage a dataset and perform fundamental statistical analyses. This book is organized like the unfolding of a research project. You begin by learning how to enter and manage data and how to do basic descriptive statistics and graphical analysis. Then, you learn how to perform standard statistical procedures from t tests, nonparametric tests, and measures of association through ANOVA, multiple regression, and logistic regression. Finally, you will find straightforward introductions to using Stata for measurement, multilevel modeling, multiple imputation, structural equation modeling (SEM), and item response theory (IRT).

The sixth edition incorporates new features of Stata 15. All menus, dialog boxes, and instructions for using the point-and-click interface have been updated. Power-and-sample-size calculations for linear regression are demonstrated using Stata 15’s new power rsquared command. This edition also includes new sections that describe how to evaluate convergent and discriminant validity, how to compute effect sizes for t tests and ANOVA models, how to use margins and marginsplot to interpret results of linear and logistic regression models, and how to use full-information maximumlikelihood (FIML) estimation with SEM to address problems with missing data.