ICPSR (the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) is an organization of universities and colleges which maintains a data archive for social scientists on the University of Michigan campus. Government agencies, organizations, and individual researchers – in short, anyone who collects social data for research – may deposit data in the archive. Because Reed College is a member of ICPSR, Reed community members may download data sets and accompanying documentation.
ICPSR data sets are raw data. A statistical program such as STATA or R (SPSS and SAS are other commonly-used programs) is needed to create tabulations from the data. Reed provides support for R and Stata. R is a free open source program, and is available pre-configured on the Reed network. Stata is available in a few computer labs, and can also be run on a personal computer using Reed's Virtual Computer Lab.
You can browse datasets without an account, but will need to be logged into one to download data.
Use this link to Create an Account. You will need to use your reed.edu email address to be able to access data (outside of COVID times a different kind of validation is done to provide access).
Use the Find Data page to locate data sets in the ICPSR data archive by words in title, principal investigator, study number or variable name.
If you are not sure of the specific data you are after or are not sure what keywords to use in a search, ICPSR has a few other entry points to datasets.
Each data holdings entry contains information that can help you to evaluate the usefulness of the data set, such as a summary, the time period covered, the format, structure, and size of the data set. Examine the entry carefully when deciding which data set(s) to download.
At a Glance tab:
Data & Documentation tab:
Variables tab:
Data-related publications tab:
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