Abstract:
Geographical coordinates such as Global Positioning System (GPS) latitude and longitude estimates form the foundation of many spatial statistical methods. gpsbound allows users to (1) import geographical information from the attribute table of a polygon shapefile based on the identified location of GPS coordinates in a Stata dataset, and (2) check that the GPS coordinates lie within the bounds of a polygon demarcated in the shapefile (e.g. enumerator areas, primary sampling units, suburb, city, country). One of the contributions of gpsbound is to allow users to work with spatial data in Stata without ever needing Geographical Information System (GIS) software.