data collection and analysis experience anyone? | FerrariChat

data collection and analysis experience anyone?

Discussion in 'Other Off Topic Forum' started by ralessi, Sep 15, 2004.

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  1. ralessi

    ralessi Formula 3

    May 26, 2002
    1,093
    Houston, TX
    Full Name:
    Rikk
    Hey everyone. I have been pretty absent lately from most discussions as I have just started my first term at Rice University here in Houston, TX. I am having a great time, and even was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at the Baker Institute, which does a lot of research on various economic, social, and policy issues around the world.

    Right now my task is to get from the World Bank's website (have this done, just took a few special steps to decrompress the data) and analyze a bunch of data for a project that my boss and a professor are working on. The only problem is that we have no analysis programs.

    The data comes in either the STATA, SAS, or simple ASCII format. The ASCII is easy, but it is just huge strings of raw data - it seems like it would be so time consuming that it would be self defeating to try to find or draw any conclusions from these kinds of sets. I have taken a quick look at the other programs - STATA and SAS - and have decided that these might be the route to take to work with this data and help to get my advisors some numbers to work with for their project.

    Does anyone have experience with either of these programs, or especially the data (household and community surveys and such) from the World Bank website? I am guessing that it is not too hard to be able to access this type of information, as people and researchers probably use it all of the time for their own reports, it is just that I have no experience with it so I am stuck trying to figure out what is going on (on a side note, I have been given the task because the people I am working for have absolutely no idea how to work with the data).

    Any help or guidance in this area of data collection and analysis would be very appreciated.
     

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