Getting Started
Welcome to Statistics 2200! In this course you’ll learn and develop many tricks of the trade, but before we get started we need to build out our toolbox for the course. Let’s Begin!
Set up the Citrix Receiver on your Laptop
In order to run the BC-credentialed software on your personal computer, you’ll have to install and log into the Citrix Receiver. This will allow you to connect to the Boston College network from home, and to save your work to the BC drive.
Everyone will begin by going to https://bcapps.bc.eduand logging in with their BC credentials. Click “install.” It may be intuitive to you from this point, but if you’d like, you may follow more in-depth directions:
For Mac: https://www.bc.edu/offices/help/teaching/app_server/setup/citrix-receiver-mac-2016.html
For Windows: https://www.bc.edu/offices/help/teaching/app_server/setup/citrix-receiver-win-2016.html
Once you have installed, you’ll be invited to add an account. It will ask for your “server address,” and you should list this as: https://bcapps.bc.edu. You may then log in with your BC credentials.
Confirm that you are able to log out, re-open, and log back into Citrix comfortably.
Accessing Stata through Citrix
There are many programs that can assist statistical analysis. For this course, we will be using “Stata.” It will likely look very unfamiliar (even a bit intimidating to you!) at first pass. Don’t worry! You’ll learn the language of Stata soon enough. For now, we’re just going to learn how to open datasets, and create logs of your work.
Once you’ve logged into Citrix, you can access your Boston College applications. Under “Apps,” select “Stata 15 SE.” You may log in with your BC credentials again.
This is how you will access Stata for the rest of the semester!
Downloading the General Social Survey Data
To learn statistical analysis, we need data to analyze! The General Social Survey is a real dataset that tracks interesting sociological trends and is moderately easy to use! If you like, you can read more about the GSS here: https://gss.norc.org/About-The-GSS
Before we do anything, you’ll have to download the dataset, and put it somewhere where Stata can find it! You’ll begin by downloading the data here:
https://gss.norc.org/Documents/stata/GSS_2014_Merged_Stata.zip
OR
https://gss.norc.org/Documents/stata/2018_stata.zip
Now you’ll have to place the data in the L Drive using Citrix so that Stata can “find” it.
Open Citrix, and select “My Apps Storage.” Create a folder in your L drive, called “stats 2020” (it’s very important that you use this language exactly), and save the GSS data into this folder. Title the data “GSS2012.”
Accessing the GSS Data from Stata
Opening the GSS data in Stata will be the first time you have to speak Stata’s language! For most of you, it’s the first time you’ll be speaking the local language of a software. This will take some getting used to. Let’s start with this small task. We’re going to open the dataset, and save a lot of your commands (the tasks you prompted Stata to perform).
To do this, you will open Stata. You’re now going to give Stata a series of commands. The first thing you have to do, is tell Stata where the data files are. You’ve put theme in the L drive in a folder called “stats 2020” so you’ll need Stata to “change directory” to that location using the command “cd.” Enter:
cd “L: \stats 2020”
Then hit return. If you do not receive an error message, Stata has located your folder. Now you are going to open the data set and create a log of your commands. Type:
log using stataprep.log, replace use GSS2012.dta, clear
log close
Then hit return.
You will now see a file appear in your L drive, titled “stataprep” which contains a log of your commands from your stata prep session.