Stata as a Data Entry Management Tool

It is increasingly common for social scientists to be involved in primary data collection, whether through the administration of unique survey instruments or the execution of field experiments. Novel datasets present novel challenges for researchers, who may find themselves responsible for ensuring that any information collected was entered into the computer accurately. This presentation discusses why and how one might use Stata as a tool for data entry management, and introduces three new user-written commands that streamline the data entry process. The commands are: cfout, an extension of the cf command that outputs a user-friendly list of all discrepancies between two datasets (e.g., the first and second entry of a double-entered dataset); readreplace, which makes many replacements to a dataset based on a corrected list of the discrepancies generated by cfout; and mergeall, which merges many files without loss of information due to string/numeric differences. This suite of commands can help reduce the cost and increase of the accuracy of primary data collection, and extends Stata’s data management capabilities to include the management of data entry.