Guidance on open access data on SAS.

[aigiss]

Hi everyone, I am relatively new to the public health world. I am a fellow at a state health department and soon I would be needing to do SAS programming. During my graduate years, I do most of my programming needs in STATA. However I feel that the analysis and data management I have done in big datasets (i.e., NHANES, BRFSS) is incorrectly done. For example, I usually export the data to excel and manage the variables in excel.

Any senior or intermediate epidemiologist or data analyst have any pointers of how they clean or manage their data? SAS coding is a new software for me to do.

Thanks!

[ballardw]

I don't know why anyone would would attempt BRFSS or NHANES or similar data with Excel. Just getting the weights applied correctly can be a nightmare. If you go to the CDC websites for the data you should find SAS code to read text files into SAS or SAS data sets in transport format; helper code like Proc Format and typically some examples of basic summary statistics.

Start with the free online SAS Programming 1.

If you are working with any of the public use data sets look for the SAS code, code books/data dictionaries and example analysis code.

You can find a large number results just putting "SAS BRFSS" or "SAS NHANES" or similar into any search engine. Though again if using those I would start on the CDC website for project specific.