Ph.D candidate in sociology Ethan Fosse just switched from Stata to doing 100% of his analysis with R. His reasons?
If you want to do Bayesian analysis or graph modeled coefficients (or work with complex data structures more generally), then R is much easier than Stata due to the object-oriented programming environment. It's unbelievably liberating to be able to save vectors, matrices, data frames, and so on from multiple data sources and manipulations in the same conceptual space. Additionally, R has fantastic graphics capabilities (3-D plots, rotating hyperplanes, social network graphs, and so on), offers excellent tools for analyzing and display so-called big data (for example, check out the "tabplot" command from Google), and is (frankly) a fun, intuitive programming language. If you need additional reasons to be an R convert, keep in mind that R is completely free, open-source, and extensible, with over 5,300 statistical packages (as of April 2012).
Read more about Ethan's conversion at the link below.
Culture Statistics and Society: I'm Converted to R Full-Time
The only thing preventing me from converting full time to R is what others tell me is its lack of ability to process fixed width data sets, such as the CPS public use file. Is this true? I've heard there's a workaround using Python to pre-process data, but is there a within-R solution?
Posted by: Ernie | May 07, 2012 at 14:12
R handles fixed-format data just fine. You can import fixed-format data into R with the read.fwf function.
Posted by: David Smith | May 07, 2012 at 14:17
read.fwf will do it, but it is a bit tricky to use. I have an example of it reading one and two records per case at http://r4stats.com/books/free-version/ pages 14-16.
My books "R for SAS and SPSS Users" and "R for Stata Users" give a much more detailed explanation of read.fwf, but the free version should get you started.
For public archives that have SAS input statements, see the package SAScii which uses R to read data using actual SAS input statements. It's located at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SAScii/index.html.
Posted by: Bob Muenchen | May 07, 2012 at 17:54
Terrific. I'll look into it. Thank you both.
Posted by: Ernie | May 08, 2012 at 06:41
ernie- here's the fully-commented code to read in the current population survey :)
Posted by: Anthony Damico | January 20, 2013 at 10:19