Stata和Spss的优劣比较- -SPSS用过的应该不少吧，Stata可能听说过的都很少。我都用过，Stata最打动我的是它的速度。那么精简的程序，可以在那么短的时间里头完成那么复杂的分析。Stata有完整的帮助系统，几乎什么问题都能自己搞定，不过前提是英语够牛B。

看了看人家老外怎么批Spss的。

A Comparison Between Stata and SPSS
The following comments on Stata vs SPSS were made on Statalist, digest issues of 2-4 November 2000.
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After studying Stata for about half a year my department asked me to tell them some more about STATA. One of the things my colleages are interested in is what they can do with STATA that they can't do with SPSS. Since I am not very familiar with SPSS I hope to find an answere on the list. Of course I know allready about the great possibilities of programming but I hope to find some answers about not to exotic statistical methods.
Marion de Leeuw
Dept. of Methodology and Statistics
Maastricht University
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I have both Stata and SPSS on my computer. In my opinion, SPSS has only two slight advantages and many, many disadvantages. The two advantages are that it is slightly more user friendly in making complex tables and graphs. But thanks to people like Nick Cox, that difference is decreasing daily. Second, SPSS has a nice routine in their logistic regression model for testing interactions. That is a trivial advantage, however. I have heard that the ANOVA commands in SPSS is also user friendly. I don't use them, however.
The only reason that I keep SPSS on my machine is that I am not pressed for disk space. I rarely use it, whereas I use Stata almost every day. Ever try to run a probit in SPSS? Nearly impossible and the documentation stinks. On the other hand, it is a breeze in Stata.
Todd Wagner
Stanford University
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I don't know if it is a big difference or not, since I don't use SPSS all that much, but Stata has the best support system I have ever seen in any software product. Not only the Stata Staff, but many Stata users respond to the most basic, and complex, questions presented. This is a fantastic advantage to anyone who uses the product.
Donald Spady
Department of Pediatrics
University of Alberta
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The bottom line is that SPSS doesn't do much, although it is (perhaps too) easy to use. For example, it's useful multivariate analysis procedures are pretty much limited to OLS, probit, and logit, with a few less useful additional procedures avialable. SPSS does not have the multiple pooled cross sectional time series routines that Stata has. There are no count procedures (Poisson, negative binomial and the zero routines), and other maximum likelihood estimators such as Tobit, multinomial logit, ordinal logit or probit, and complementary log-log models are not readily avialable.
Additional problems with SPSS include no Huber-White correction for heteroskedascity, and none of Stata's extensive tests that are available after estimation. The anova routines in SPSS are not nearly as comprehensive as those in Stata. The last time I looked at SPSS there weren't any provisions for Cox regression and the other extensive duration analysis procedures that Stata offers. In short, anyone who limits themselves to SPSS would be quite handicaped.
Dave Jacobs
Ohio State University
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One of the things you can do with Stata that you can't do with SPSS is estimate models for complex surveys. Most SPSS procedures will allow weights, but although these will produce correct estimates, the standard errors will be too small (aweights or iweights versus pweights). SPSS cannot take clustering into account at all. This is an important issue, most surveys use a weight variable to take stratification and/or sampling bias (random or due to non-response) into account, but standard programs can lead to incorrect inferences on statistical significance.
There are a lot of user-written programs out there and -webseek- makes it much easier to find solutions to non-standard problems. These problems need not be exotic, one problem that fired up a lot of discussion among a group of us was the comparison of coefficients of nested logistic models. With a downloadable ado file, standardized coefficients and marginal effects can be calculated easily. The only way to do that in SPSS is with a macro that estimates a logistic model using matrix facilities (if you happen to have such a macro, it wouldn't be easy to write one). Alternative fit measures like BIC, AIC, pseudo R^2 measures can be easily added to Stata, in SPSS you'd have to write a visual basic script (assuming that would work).
Stata also has excellent programs for event history analysis or panel data analysis, but perhaps these are "exotic" methods according to you or your colleagues. Well, SPSS is good enough for most purposes, most of the time. What annoys me about SPSS is that it's pace of development is so slow. Only a handful of statistical procedures have been added in the last five years: GLM, NOMREG, PLUM, one or two others. Just glance through a few STBs for comparison. SPSS has concentrated on graphical output since 1995, to the annoyance of many users. Their implementation is an interface nightmare, you have to navigate two scrollbars just to view your *text* output! To hide elements of their pivot tables you choose "hide" from a right-click menu, except in some cases where you choose "ungroup". Add the bugs in the last release and the expensive price/lease, and you've got plenty of arguments in favour of Stata.
John Hendrickx
University of Nijmegen