The Oxford Internet Survey was featured in the current issue of the Stata News. Stata News goes out to around 100,000 users of the statistical software package Stata. Stata was particularly interested in the fact that all the graphics in the 2011 Report were produced using Stata.
By using Stata we were able to create publication-ready graphics directly from data. Doing the graphs this way gave us the ability to use a standard template that automatically created the graphs according to a single consistent style. Furthermore, by creating the graphs from data directly we never had to re-enter any numbers. Not only does this avoid a tedious, error-prone data-entry task, it also means that we were never concerned with checking the numbers. Finally, since this process was so much simpler and easier we could create and look at many more graphs before selecting the most interesting ones to be included in the Report.
All the graphs were created using scripts (meaning command files: Stata do-files). For the next wave of OxIS we can change the dataset name and some of the labels and rerun the same scripts. We hope that this will simplify the task of creating the Report from the 2013 data.
Altogether Stata has served OxIS very well. We are delighted that Stata News spreads the word about OxIS to Stata users.
You can read the article about OxIS at: http://www.stata.com/news/statanews.27.1.pdf
The Stata News is published quarterly by Stata Corp. The article about OxIS appears in the first issue of 2012, volume 27, number 1.
