The Carolina Population Center is a SAS shop, and its 25 programmers have long favored SAS for data management. Its research faculty, however, encourage the use of Stata to adjust for survey sampling effects. In an effort to introduce both SAS programmers and students to Stata, we wrote a web-based Stata tutorial (www.cpc.unc.edu/research/tools/data_analysis/statatutorial/). It focuses on the subset of Stata commands necessary to manage survey research files. This includes commands to clean data that are out of range, find duplicate identifiers that should not exist, recode variables and create new ones, and document the data. Because the surveys often involve hierarchical file structures, the tutorial covers merging and reshaping. It also introduces various labor-saving commands. In addition to discussing the tutorial, we will talk about our SAS User's Guide to Stata (www.cpc.unc.edu/research/tools/data_analysis/sas_to_stata/), which is designed to help SAS programmers make the transition to Stata by providing Stata equivalent commands for SAS statements and attempting to explain the basic conceptual differences between SAS and Stata.
