Red… I’ve been seeing so much red! And all I wanted is some black…
Ok, this is not as serious as it sounds – I am not bankrupt.
Luckily (I guess), the red is not printed on my bank statement but rather appears whenever I enter commands in Stata. This is very frustrating but, I suppose, a way to learn… a very slow, painful way.
This week I’ve started conducting some serious analyses of my data set, HILDA. So far I have only opened it, checked I have a large enough pool of observations for each variable and run a few very simple, fun regressions. Now it’s time… time to delve into the more difficult domains.
First hurdle: merge that data. HILDA consists of 10 waves I need to combine into one big data set in order to analyse it. Sounds like it should be easy? Wrong – at least in my case. My experience with Stata so far has been restricted to solving specific questions. Merging data has never been a task, as data sets usually come nicely prepared for classroom exercises.
I have consulted one of the lovely academics at university, and she was so kind to spend a few minutes explaining the process. I now have the conceptual knowledge to reshape my data set, but that posed only half of the challenge (maybe not even half). Stata will only accept the correct commands! It’s very picky like that.
Researching commands on the internet has hardly been helpful, as I do not speak fluent programmer (yet). It has, however, contributed to my overall understanding of the desired outcome and the theoretical way to achieve it.
Now Stata needs to comply. My first merging attempts are turning fertile – I created at least some black letters and numbers yesterday and am pretty certain I can work it out.
The next step will be to estimate my fixed effects model. This I am more confident about, as I gained some knowledge on fixed effects models earlier in the semester as part of my advanced econometrics course. Go uni skills!
I will also need to graph satisfaction trajectories, which will illustrate the change in happiness over time caused by an event. Again, theoretically I have an idea how this can be done. I guess, I’ll have to wait and see whether Stata thinks I’m right…
Two weeks to go – will I be fine? I’m saying yes. There is much to accomplish, but I’m tough. I can do it! Once these results are out I can compile my final report and work on my presentation. Also, hello to the Associate Dean of Research, who will be attending our presentations; I promise I’ll try to make it interesting! And thanks to Martin for making it just this little bit more scary…
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Lena's research right here! 