The 5-day MEAFA Professional Development Workshop on Quantitative Analysis Using Stata, 23-25 July 2008 has proven to be a great success!
Across the five days, there were 45 participants from Australia and New Zealand, from academia (PhD students and academics), governmental bodies and the private sector, from a wide range of disciplines.
Specifically, consistent with MEAFA's standard policy of affordable PhD training, the workshop was attended by 10 PhD students from the Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, the University of Technology Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the University of Western Sydney.
Other more senior academic researchers came also from La Trobe University, the University of Wollongong, the Griffith University, the University of South Australia and Macquarie University.
Practitioners (private and government) who attended the workshop came from the Sydney South West Area Health Service, the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, Hunter Industrial Medicine, SBScibus, the Department of Education, the Australian Institute of Criminology, the Productivity Commission and Princess Alexandra Hospital.
According to feedback from participants, the most useful aspects of the workshop include:
o Thorough handouts with great material for background reading
o Theory followed by practical applications
o Variety of empirical questions
o Discussion of state of the art methods for data management, statistical diagnostics and estimation
We also received many comments for future improvement which we promise to take into serious consideration, including:
o More Stata applications especially for programming
o More interactive activities
o Improved progression from day 1 to day 5 for those who wish to attend all days
o More specialised days
We thank all participants for their support and comments.