Love Data Week 2020 is officially underway. Each day this week, we’ll be highlighting a different data-related resource available to the UC San Diego community. Whether you’re in the social sciences, arts and humanities, or STEM fields, the Library would love to help you find, use, and share data.
We want to kick things off by shining a spotlight on the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), of which UC San Diego is a member. ICPSR has been collecting and facilitating access to social science data for nearly 60 years and all that data (over 11,000 studies with nearly 5.4 million variables) is available for use by UC San Diego affiliates.
ICPSR’s data collections are especially strong when it comes to longitudinal studies, which follow the same cohort of individuals over time. If you are looking for data about criminal justice, addiction, aging, economic or political behavior, education, governmental policies, healthcare, civic engagement, or some other social science topic, there is a very good chance ICPSR will have what you are looking for. Plus, with study data from a variety of federal organizations—including Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, Center for Economics Studies, and many others—and private organizations (i.e., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and more), ICPSR is a great one-stop-shop to start looking for social science data.
Some studies of note include:
- American National Election Study (ANES)
- National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)
- Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY)
- Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS)
To download data, you will need to create a free account on the ICPSR website. Because data access is restricted to member organizations, be sure to access ICPSR either via the UCSD-PROTECTED Wi-Fi network, or using the VPN to access from off-campus.
In addition to providing access to a wide range of datasets, ICPSR also provides online resources for teaching and learning using social science data, as well as their popular in-person Summer Workshops in Quantitative Social Sciences.
You can find the master list to free and Library-subscribed data resources by discipline on the Library’s guide to Finding Data & Statistics. Questions? Contact Data Science Librarian Stephanie Labou.
Image courtesy of Arif Wahid (@arifrw) on Unsplash.