A Survey on Survey Statistics: What is done, can be done in Stata, and what's missing

Among survey statisticians Stata is increasingly recognized as one of the more powerful statistical software packages for the analysis of complex survey data. This paper will survey the capabilities of Stata to analyze complex survey data. We will briefly review and compare different methods for variance estimation for stratified and clustered samples, and discuss the handling of survey weights. Examples will be given for the practical importance of Stata's survey capabilities. In addition we will point to statistical solutions that aren't yet part of the official package, and review user written ados that currently extend Stata's survey capabilities. Among the specific topics we will cover are replication variance estimation (jackknife, balanced repeated replication, and the bootstrap), issues associated with degrees of freedom and domain estimates, quantile estimation, and some concerns related to model fitting using survey data.