StataCorp now provides free tutorial videos on StataCorp’s YouTube channel,

http://www.youtube.com/user/statacorp

There are 24 videos providing 1 hour 51 minutes of instructional entertainment:

Stata Quick Tour (5:47)
Stata Quick Help (2:47)
Stata PDF Documentation (6:37)

Stata One-sample t-test (3:43)
Stata t-test for Two Independent Samples (5:09)
Stata t-test for Two Paired Samples (4:42)

Stata Simple Linear Regression (5:33)

Stata SEM Builder (8:09)
Stata One-way ANOVA (5:15)
Stata Two-way ANOVA (5:57)

Stata Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (3:29)
Stata Pearson’s Chi2 and Fisher’s Exact Test (3:16)

Stata Box Plots (4:04)
Stata Basic Scatterplots (5:19)
Stata Bar Graphs (4:15)
Stata Histograms (4:50)
Stata Pie Charts (5:32)

Stata Descriptive Statistics (5:49)

Stata Tables and Crosstabulations (7:20)
Stata Combining Crosstabs and Descriptives (5:58)

Stata Converting Data to Stata with Stat/Transfer (2:47)
Stata Import Excel Data (1:33)
Stata Excel Copy/Paste (1:16)
Stata Example Data Included with Stata (2:14)

And more are forthcoming.

The inside story

Alright, that’s the official announcement.

Last Friday, 21 September 2012, was an exciting day here at StataCorp. After a couple of years of “wouldn’t it be cool if”, and a couple of months of “we’re almost there”, Stata’s YouTube channel was finally ready for prime time.

Stata’s YouTube Channel was the brainchild of Karen Strope, StataCorp’s Director of Marketing, but I had something to do with it, too. Well, maybe more than something, but I’m a modest guy. Anyway, I thought it sounded like fun and recorded a few prototype videos. Annette Fett, StataCorp’s Graphic Designer, added the cool splash-screen and after a few experiments, we soon had 24 Blu-ray resolution videos. We’ve kicked off with videos covering topics such as a tour of Stata’s interface, how to create basic graphs, how to conduct many common statistical analyses, and more.

My personal favorite is the video entitled Combining Crosstabs and Descriptives because it’s relevant to nearly all Stata users and works well as a video demonstration.

Videos about Stata – isn’t that like dancing about architecture?

Stata has over 9,000 pages of documentation included in PDF format, a built-in Help system, and a collection of books on general and special topics published by Stata Press, and an extensive collection of dialog boxes that make even the most complex graphs and analyses easy to perform.

So aren’t the videos, ahh, unnecessary?

The problem is, it’s cumbersome to describe how to use all of Stata’s features, especially dialog boxes, in a manual, even when you have 9,000 pages, and 9,000 pages tries even the most dedicated user’s patience.

In a 3-7 minutes video, we can show you how to create complicated graphs or a sophisticated structural equation model.

We have three audiences in mind.

1. Videos for non-Stata users, whom we call future Stata users; videos intended to provide a loosely guided tour of Stata’s features.
2. Videos for new Stata users, such as the person who might simply want to know “How do I calculate a twoway ANOVA in Stata?” or “How do I create a Pie Chart?”. These videos will get them up and running quickly and painlessly.
3. Videos for experienced Stata users who want to learn new tips and tricks.

There’s actually a fourth group that’s of interest, too; experienced Stata users teaching statistics or data analysis classes, who don’t want to spend valuable class time showing their students how to use Stata. They can refer their students to the relevant videos as homework and thus free class time for the teaching of statistics.

Request for comments

One of the fun things about working at StataCorp is that management doesn’t much use the word “no”. New ideas are more often met with the phrase, “well, let’s try it and see what happens”. So I’m trying this. My plan is to add a couple of videos to the channel every week or two as time permits. I have a list of topics I’d like to cover including things like multiple imputation, survey analysis, mixed models, Stata’s “immediate” commands (tabi, ttesti, csi, cci, etc…), and more examples using the SEM Builder.

However, I will take requests. If you have a suggested topic or a future video, leave a comment.

I’d like to keep the videos brief, between 3-7 minutes, so please don’t request feature-length films like “How to do survival analysis in Stata”. Similarly, topics that are only interesting to you and your two post-docs such as “Please describe the difference between the Laplacian Approximation and Adaptive Gauss-Hermite Quadrature in the xtmepoisson command” are not likely to see the light of day. But I am very interested in your ideas for small, bite-sized topics that will work in a video format.