Recommended intro book for undergratuate students?

[Christopher Bratt]

My psychology department currently asks us to use SPSS when teaching stats classes. I'd like our stats classes to use either a GUI shell for R or to use Stata. My personal dislike of SPSS is not the reason. Instead: (1) I want students to be able to download stats software -- which is not possible with SPSS and (2) I think more advanced regression analyses in SPSS with the PROCESS macro are very unintuitive. I just learned that my university considers purchasing Stata licenses for everyone to use, which would allow students to download a copy of Stata to their personal computers. So, now Stata has become an attractive alternative for teaching! I might try to motivate the department to make the switch (even though Stata seems not tailored towards psychological research).

I'm sorry for asking for opinionated responses, but which introduction to statistics and Stata do you recommend for undergraduates? Among the Stata books I own, "An Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis Using Stata: From Research Design to Final Report" by Daniels & Minot seems to be the best introduction for undergraduate students (and it covers most of what is needed). Does anyone of you have a recommendation for a book to teach undergraduate students stats and Stata (with GUI and in English)?

[Joro Kolev]

My view is that SPSS and Excel are a no no thing. The reason for this are that as far as I understand SPSS is not a scripting language, and Excel is not a scripting language for sure. So very simply one cannot replicate the clicks that one has done, and if you want to change something that you did a couple of hundred of lines ago, you need to start all over again, which is not a way to do research.

I personally think that Stata is the best statistical scripting language. But I have used TSP and Eviews long time ago before Stata became dominant, at the end of 90ties beginning of the 2000s. They were doing the job just fine. I used R parallelly to Stata for about 4-6 months at some point when I was a PhD student, it was a fine language too, a bit overrated, but it was doing the job. Finally some of my undergraduate students at not so rich universities who do not want to pay money for Stata have used Gretl; as far as I could see Gretl is doing the job too.

Long story short, if one is not doing something advanced, pretty much any scripting regression software would do the job. But SPSS and Excel do not do the job.

[Andrew Musau]

You should consider "A Gentle Introduction to Stata" by Alan Acock. The book's main target are students in the social sciences, so this will do fine for your purposes. The sixth edition was released in 2022 (see https://www.stata.com/bookstore/gent...tion-to-stata/), but here is a review for the previous edition: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf...867X1501500216.

[Joro Kolev]

About the books, when I was a PhD student I used to teach Applied Econometrics for economists, and Applied Statistics and Econometrics for management students.

For the economists' course we were using the standard and excellent textbook by Prof Wooldridge "Introductory econometrics: A modern approach," plus the Stata manuals for whatever needs to be done in Stata.

For the management students' course my course leader and mentor was the great Catalan statistician Prof. Albert Satorra. With Prof Satorra we were having the course around two books which are excellent (and not well known to economists); both books are by Prof Lawrence C. Hamilton, "Regression with Graphics: A Second Course in Applied Statistics" and "Statistics with Stata". This worked beautifully, because both books are excellent books on regressions analysis, and they are built around Stata.

[Christopher Bratt]

Thanks to both Joro Kolev and Andrew Musau. Yes, Andrew Musau, A Gentle Introduction to Stata seems like a reasonable choice, given that a new edition was released recently; thanks a lot for that one. I'll have a look (I see readers' reviews at Amazon are very favourable). Andrew, if you have any thoughts on Norwegian books on Stata, I'd be thankful if you could drop me a private message.

[Chen Samulsion]

Scott Baldwin Psychological Statistics and Psychometrics Using Stata, a textbook for graduate-level courses in psychometrics. It is composed of three parts: 1)Getting oriented to Stata, 2)Understanding relationships between variables, and 3)Psychometrics through the lens of factor analysis.https://www.stata.com/bookstore/psyc...s-using-stata/

[Christopher Bratt]

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions. My challenge is that I need a book that focuses on GUI, that is, using menues rather than code. My preference for code - I use R more than Stata - does not matter. When teaching undergraduates, I will have to avoid relying on code. I can use more advanced books when teaching researchers.

Alan Acock's book might be an option. However, it seems to teach Stata but not statistics? (I don't have access to the book.) So maybe my original choice is currently the best solution for these undergraduate students, who have virtually no knowledge about statistics:

https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/an-...%AE/book255055