datanet: A Stata procedure to facilitate dataset organization for network analysis

In recent years, much interest has focused on network analysis. This study presents and applies to real data a new user-written Stata command called datanet, which facilitates the dataset organization for the purpose of network analysis. Given a fixed number of units (or nodes) belonging to the same group (there will be a variable denoting group membership) and possibly connected to each other, this routine creates a new dataset containing all their possible couplings, which can be easily exploited with Stata network analysis’ commands. To our knowledge, no routine has been developed in Stata so far that executes this type of procedure. Moreover, this presentation will also review how to perform some basic network analysis in Stata and discuss further network analysis’ applications we deem of worth developing in Stata in the near future.