STATA is a general-purpose interactive statistical software package available in major platforms such as Windows, Unix, and Macintosh. In part due to its up-to-date coverage of statistical methodology and flexibility in implementing user-defined modules, STATA has gained considerable popularity among social and behavioral scientists, including survey researchers, in recent years despite its initial learning curve for the uninitiated.

STATA comes in four versions: (1) small STATA, a student version; (2) intercooled STATA, the "standard" version; (3) STATA/SE, a version for large data sets; and (4) STATA/MP, a parallel-processing-capable version of STATA/SE. Depending on size of data and number of variables as well as computer capacity, most survey researchers will likely choose Intercooled STATA and STATA/SE, in that order of preference.

With a fairly developed graphics capacity, STATA ...