ACRL/EBSS Psychology Committee

Stata uses one line commands which can be entered one command at a time or many at a time in a Stata program. Stata primarily works with one data file at a time so working with multiple files at once can be tricky. Like SAS and SPSS, Stata can work with large numbers of variables (over 32,000). Stata is considered to be the best program for regression and survey data analysis. Creating high-quality graphs in Stata is also very easy.

The program allows basic coding and retrieval of data at the text level and it also allows more sophisticated analysis activities at the conceptual level, such as linking codes to form semantic networks and algorithms. ATLAS.ti also supports the quantitative analysis of qualitative data with its SPSS export function, which treats codes as variables and quotations as cases. It is considered to be less structured than NVivo but easier to learn for basic operations.