Using Large Data Sets in Policy Research

Catalog description

This half-semester course will focus on the analysis of data. We will discuss cleaning raw data – including trimming, variable transformations, and dealing with missing data – before turning to complex survey data. We will discuss how regression analysis differs when using complex survey data. Students will take real data and produce a cleaned version, as well as perform simple analyses using multiple regression. One key skill you will learn in this class is Stata, a commonly used statistics package. I will teach the basics, but if you have not used it before, you will likely need to spend a bit of extra time becoming acquainted with the program.