Resources

These pages help researchers access information about obtaining and analyzing data, identifying software to use in doing research, and locating research centers that collect large data sets.

IRiSS sponsors workshops, conferences, and collaborative grants to bring the most current and exciting developments in social science research to Stanford.  IRiSS brings together Stanford faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, as well as faculty from other universities, to conduct original and socially relevant research and to learn research skills.

Help with Research

Help with Research

• Social Science Resource Center: The SSRC at the Green Library at Stanford provides a diverse set of resources in all languages useful for advanced inquiry into and reflection upon social, economic, and political phenomena.
• Guide to Social Science Research Online:  This Stanford Library site provides a variety of resources to begin a research project.  These resources include discipline specific journal databases, dataset resources, and more.
• Government Resources on the Web:  This site, maintained by University of Michigan, provides access to a variety of government resources, including branches of the U.S. government and constitutional resources.

Statistical Analysis:  Want some advice on how to conduct statistical analyses?  These resources can help.

Statistical Analysis

• Statistics Department Consulting: 
  The Department of Statistics offers a free, drop-in consulting service to members of the University community. The consulting is done by graduate students who are enrolled in a course training them about advising others’ statistical analysis efforts.  The consultants are supervised by a faculty member.  Consulting is done during a specific time period each week on a first come, first served basis.
• Social Science Data and Software Consulting:
  Software consultants provide support in the use of the most popular statistical analysis software, including SPSS, Stata, and SAS, as well as qualitative software such as NVivo and ATLAS.ti. Consultants can help a researcher choose the right software for a research project, get started using a particular software package, identify resources for learning and teaching statistical and qualitative analysis software, provide advice on survey design and data entry, suggest solutions to common software problems, and advise on data management, data reshaping, and data conversion.
  
  Users visiting The Velma Denning Room in Green Library can evaluate a variety of quantitative and qualitative software packages, including specialized software for advanced methods (AMOS), social network analysis (UCINET), multi-level modeling (HLM), and spatial statistics (ArcGIS and SpaceStat). DBMS/COPY and Stat/Transfer are available for data converting and formatting when transferring between statistical software packages. Printed SSDS help documents for learning many of the supported quantitative, qualitative and data conversion software packages are available in The Velma Denning Room. Users can also view and download our guides and help documents from the SSDS website.
  
  SSDS consultants do not provide advice on what statistics to conduct for a particular research project and do not conduct analysis for a researcher.

Survey Data Collection:  Want some advice on how to conduct statistical analyses?  These resources can help.

Survey Data Collection

If you need to collect data via a survey, here are some options:

• Survey Said
• SPSS survey tools
• Focus Groups
• CFMC
• Survey System
• Ioxphere
• Sawtooth
• Senecio
• Survey Monkey

Survey Research Centers:  These institutions have many missions, including the planning and conduct of high quality social science research and the dissemination of findings from this research.  They may be able to assist you with the collection of data.

Survey Research Centers

Survey research centers plan and conduct high quality social science research and disseminate the findings from this research.

If these do not fit your needs, please go to www.aapor.org and check their blue book of research centers.

ACADEMIC

• Ball State University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Chicago
• Fairleigh Dickinson University
• Florida International University
• Indiana University (Bloomington)
• Iowa State University
• Ohio State University Center for Survey Research
• University of Maryland
• University of Michigan
• Princeton University
• University of Nevada - Reno
• Northern Arizona University
• University of North Carolina
• University of Oregon
• University of Pittsburgh
• Research Triangle Institute
• University of Wisconsin - Madison
• University of Virginia
• Megasite - University of Kansas
• University of Wyoming
• Ohio Poll - University of Cincinnati

COMMERCIAL

• Public Agenda
• The Polling Report
• The Economic Policy Institute
• The Gallup Organization
• The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
• SSDC Public Opinion Data
• California Poll
• Eagleton Institute
• Quinnipiac polls
• The Foundation Center

NEWS MEDIA
The Star Tribune Minnesota Poll  
The L.A. Times Poll

Associations and Societies:  These are associations of researchers who focus on the collection of survey data.

Associations and Societies

• The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)
• The Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO)
• The Marketing Research Association (MRA)
• National Council on Public Polls (NCPP)
• The Association for Consumer Research (ACR)
• European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR)

Get Your Data Sets:  Do you have a research question and need some data to use in testing?  These sites can help you locate a dataset.

Get Your Data Sets

First we provide links to individual studies that allow for data download.  Then we provide links to Centers and Libraries that have a large collection of data available for download.

Individual Studies

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. The Roper Center Catalog of Holdings includes the popular iPOLL and JPOLL online databases, which allow you to search for and extract the results of surveys. Detailed information about Roper and how to request a Roper dataset is available on the Roper information page.

General Social Survey 1972 - 2000 Cumulative CodebookThe GSS (General Social Survey) is an almost annual, "omnibus," personal interview survey of U.S. households conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The first survey took place in 1972 and since then more than 38,000 respondents have answered over 3,260 different questions.  Data can be directly downloaded from this page.

American National Election Studies The American National Election Studies (ANES) produces high quality data on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists who want to better understand the theoretical and empirical foundations of national election outcomes. Central to this mission is the active involvement of the ANES research community in all phases of the project.  Data can be directly downloaded from this page

Panel Study of Income Dynamics  The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), begun in 1968, is a longitudinal study of a representative sample of U.S. individuals (men, women, and children) and the family units in which they reside. It emphasizes the dynamic aspects of economic and demographic behavior, but its content is broad, including sociological and psychological measures.  Data can be directly downloaded from this page.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) is a nationally representative study that explores the causes of health-related behaviors of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 and their outcomes in young adulthood. Add Health seeks to examine how social contexts (families, friends, peers, schools, neighborhoods, and communities) influence adolescents' health and risk behaviors.  Data can be directly downloaded from this page.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey is a population-based survey designed to collect information on the health and nutrition of the U.S. household population.  Data can be directly downloaded from this page.

Current Population Survey  The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a monthly survey of about 50,000 households conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey has been conducted for more than 50 years. The CPS is the primary source of information on the labor force characteristics of the U.S. population. The sample is scientifically selected to represent the civilian noninstitutional population. Respondents are interviewed to obtain information about the employment status of each member of the household 15 years of age and older. However, published data focus on those ages 16 and over. The sample provides estimates for the nation as a whole and serves as part of model-based estimates for individual states and other geographic areas. Estimates obtained from the CPS include employment, unemployment, earnings, hours of work, and other indicators. They are available by a variety of demographic characteristics including age, sex, race, marital status, and educational attainment. They are also available by occupation, industry, and class of worker. Supplemental questions to produce estimates on a variety of topics including school enrollment, income, previous work experience, health, employee benefits, and work schedules are also often added to the regular CPS questionnaire. Data is available for download from this page

Centers and Libraries

 

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Stanford users can download datasets directly from the ICPSR Data Archive on any computer in the Stanford University network, or connect off-campus via Stanford's proxy server. Consult our ICPSR page for more information.

The Odum Institute Data Archive (UNC)The Institute maintains the country's third-largest archive of computer-readable social science data. Holdings include national and international economic, electoral, demographic, financial, health, public opinion, and other types of data to meet a variety of research and teaching needs.

Social Science Data and Software: Stanford SSDS has a variety of options including: 

DEWI is a web-based application for accessing social science numeric data. It incorporates codebook information, allowing users to browse variables or search for them by keywords. Variables of interest can be selected, extracted, and downloaded to your computer in a variety of formats with popular statistical software. DEWI datasets are selected from the Stanford University Libraries' collection. Find out more about this unique system on our DEWI page or connect directly to DEWI at http://dewi.stanford.edu.

Data on CD-ROM and Diskette: A rich collection of numeric data on CD-ROM and diskette from U.S. federal offices and agencies, international organizations and foreign governments on a range of topics and from a wide range of time periods. Users can access popular CD-ROM programs and data via computer workstations in The Velma Denning Room. Extraction results are saved on a floppy or zip disk, writeable CD-ROM or via SecureFX. Browse the CD-ROM cabinets in The Velma Denning Room or the online catalog Socrates for full descriptions and titles not installed on the workstations. In addition, Stanford users can access an archive of compressed data from our secure site.

Listing of Numeric Data and Databases at Stanford University  

Listing of Statistics Sources at Stanford

Sources of Comparative International Statistics

GSB List of Statistical Databases

GSB List of Statistics Sites

U.S. Census Bureau  Provides access to DataFerrett.  DataFerrett is a tool and data librarian that searches and retrieves data across federal, state, and local surveys, executes customized variable recoding, creates complex tabulations and business graphics. Current Population Survey, Survey of Income and Program Participation, American Community Survey, American Housing Survey, Small Area Income Poverty Estimates, Population Estimates, Economic Census Areawide Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics data, Centers for Disease Control data, and more.  Data can be directly downloaded through DataFerrett.

Social Science Data ArchiveCESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives) promotes the acquisition, archiving and distribution of electronic data for social science teaching and research in Europe. It encourages the exchange of data and technology and fosters the development of new organisations in sympathy with its aims.  This site includes US sources of data.  Data is available for download from this page.

International Social Science Archives  CESSDA (Council of European Social Science Data Archives) promotes the acquisition, archiving and distribution of electronic data for social science teaching and research in Europe. It encourages the exchange of data and technology and fosters the development of new organisations in sympathy with its aims.  Data is available for download from this page. 

Political Science (West Virginia) Provides a list of available data sources from many of the leading sources of data available on the internet.  Data is available for download from this page.

Social Science Archives (UCSD) Provides access to 156 sites that have numeric
data ready to download.  Also has a Searchable Catalogs of Data that includes 52 catalogs and lists of data from data libraries, archives, vendors. Data Archives
provide access to 52 Data Libraries and Data Archives worldwide.  Data is available for download from this page

Last modified: 21-Nov-2007