Using Stata to analyze public opinion data: An open educational resource for beginning undergraduate and graduate methods courses in political science

This presentation provides an overview of a new Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook for analyzing public opinion data using Stata created by the author. Based on the author’s experience teaching research methods for political science at Portland State University, the guide walks students through an article published in Democratization using publicly available data from the Arab Barometer. Students learn how to craft a research question, identify and measure variables, and perform descriptive and multivariate statistical tests. At the end of the course, students will be able to replicate the published findings and craft their own research design for analyzing public opinion data. The author presents the Stata commands used to produce the results reported in the published article to guide students through the replication and their own original research project.