ICPSR is an organization that collects sets of social and political data, and makes them available to its members. Its collection includes government statistics, polling data from universities and companies, economic data both foreign and domestic, etc.
Searching:
- Choose “Advanced Search”:
- Advanced Search allows searching of multiple terms, but searches for all terms entered. It does not allow truncation, phrase or Boolean searching
- This will lead to a list:
- Each entry has a description, a download option (for which you will have to set up an account), and related literature, which is a bibliography of research using the data set. Some entries also have an option for online analysis (which also requires an account).
- Click on “description” to check for appropriate subject headings:
You may want to adjust your search terms – notice that “domestic violence” is used instead of “battered women”.
- To view or download data, set up an account with your email and a password.
- If “online analysis” is available, you will be able to do some preliminary statistics online:
Choose a variable from the list (1), click on it to paste it in the selection box (2), and then select “row” or “column” to set up a distribution or crosstabulation:
