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Michele Hayslett
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Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

What is ICPSR? | Purpose | A Note about Privacy |
How to Acquire Data for Research | Off-Campus Access |
Other ICPSR Resources | Additional NCSU Resources for Using Numeric Data

What is ICPSR?

A unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, ICPSR is a membership-based organization, with hundreds of member colleges and universities around the world. The consortium supplies data files for use with statistical software, such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata.

You will need basic statistical skills for using online analysis tools and more advanced skills for running your own analysis. Although SAS, SPSS, and Stata setup files are provided with many ICPSR datasets, they are not available for all data sets. Contact Data Services for a referral if you need help with a particular software package.

The ICPSR data holdings contain some 6,000 studies and 450,000 files that cover a wide range of social science areas such as:

While the ICPSR holdings include several time series and other types of aggregate data, its holdings consist mainly of raw data derived from surveys, censuses, and administrative records. These data were originally collected for specific research or administrative purposes. However, the data have research potential that outlives the original purposes for which they were collected. ICPSR preserves these valuable data resources and makes them publicly available for secondary analysis.

Purpose

ICPSR's main function is the collection, preservation and dissemination of digital social science data. It:

• Provides data such as public opinion polls, survey of mass and elite attitudes, election returns, legislative records, census records, international financial statistics, income dynamics and social welfare program participation, among others.
• Contains important data sets such as the American National Election Study, the Quality of Employment Survey, the Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and Plea Bargaining in the United States.
• Includes numerous special topic archives.

A Note about Privacy

Notice:  Any personal information you provide to ICPSR is kept by them indefinitely and may be subject to disclosure pursuant to subpoena or other court order.  If you do not wish to provide personal information, you may log in anonymously.

How to Acquire Data for Research

ICPSR data may be downloaded directly from the ICPSR web site to computers on the NCSU campus network (or through the proxy server--see below). In some cases Web-based extraction and analysis tools are available.

ICPSR Direct

This program allows anyone with a campus IP address to access ICPSR data sets without an intermediary. Go to the ICPSR web page at http://www.icpsr.org/. Use the search box in the bottom center to search for data sets by keyword or, if known, study number. Results are presented by study title with several hyperlinks:

• description - details about the study
• download - allows user to select specific files for a given study:
  • documentation or metadata about the study (the codebook*)
  • ASCII format data file with setup information for commonly used statistical softwares
  • (sometimes) multiple data sets, for instance multiple years in a time series study
• related literature - to find research authors have indicated is related to a particular data set
• online analysis - only available for some studies - indicates existence of a web tool enabling online manipulation of those data, eliminating the need to download the data set and manipulate it in Stata, SAS or SPSS. (The software powering many of these tools was developed by the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program [CSM] at the University of California, Berkeley.)

*Please note: Hardcopy codebooks can still be found in the libraries' collections and other places around campus. However, many studies in the ICPSR archives are on-going and the old codebooks will not reflect the most current information. ICPSR strongly recommends referring to the online documentation files for the most accurate information.

It's a very good idea to download a study's documentation and codebook and read it before downloading the data itself. That will help you determine if a study is suitable for your purposes before you accumulate the other associated files.

When you select a study to download, you will be asked for your email address and information about your NCSU affiliation. You will also see a responsible use statement to which you must agree. After that, you will be able to download the data directly to your desktop.

Off-Campus Access

By logging in once from campus, your ICPSR account will automatically be approved for off-campus access for six months.

Other ICPSR Resources

• Online Data Use Tutorial - for getting started with ICPSR data sets
• Data User Help Center - other tutorials for downloading and using data
• ICPSR's Help Documentation - searchable database of FAQs

Additional NCSU Resources for Using Numeric Data

• Tools useful for Choosing a Topic - NCSU description of ICPSR tools
• FAQs about ICPSR
• How to Download ICPSR Data
• Guide to Planning Data Research (initial steps)
• Brief Guide to Acquiring Data (overall steps)