Cohort study practical advice

[Michael Mortensen]

Hello everyone,

Being very new to Stata I would love to have your inputs for my upcoming scientific study.

I am about to start a cohort study where patients will be recruited on a daily basis, and I will have to manually enter their data as they enter the study.

Would you recommend entering this data directly into Stata or would you enter data in Excel first and then export it to Stata?

Secondly, I have also discovered that when creating a new variable (based on two other variables in the dataset with an expression), and I change a value in a variable, the calculations are not recalculated automatically as they are changed. Is there a command to re-run calculations?

Thanks in advance for your tips and help!

Best,
Michael

[Maarten Buis]

As to your second question: We prepare data using .do files, see chapter 16 of the User's Guide: https://www.stata.com/manuals/u.pdf

[Mike Lacy]

I haven't tried Maarten's suggestion, but even though I'm from the "friends don't let friends use Excel" school of thought, I would likely use it for a purpose like this. I believe there are also little Excel programs running around that allow data entry control, e.g., restricting the codes that can be entered for a given variable (column).

[Maarten Buis]

Mike Lacy My suggestion was to answer Michael's second question "Is there a command to re-run calculations?" not a suggestion on how to most conveniently and safely type in Data.