This exercise will use a subset of the European Social Survey(ESS) data which should be opened within Stata. The subset can be accessed from the link below:

You will need access to the statistical software programme Stata to complete this task, and you may need your UK HE/FE Institutional username and password to access the ESS.

Suppose that you wished to compare the level of trust in politicians (trstplt) between different countries. In Stata the relevant command would be.

This will list the means and standard deviations of the trstplt for each value of the variable 'country'. The first few lines of the output should look like the following.

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-> country = AT

    Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------
     trstplt |       295    3.386441    2.351686          0         10

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-> country = BE

    Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------
     trstplt |       297    4.124579     2.15951          0          8

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-> country = CH

    Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------
     trstplt |       292    4.732877    1.992395          0          9