Data Collections

Data collections gather original data produced by social scientists and make it available to other scholars. They may include public opinion surveys, surveys of economic behavior, surveys of electoral behavior, census data, health data, and economic and social indicators. They are most often in numerical, computer file format and are most often used by advanced researchers.

At UMass Amherst

Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research (MISER) Located at the UMass Amherst campus. As the lead agency in the State Data Center (SDC) program, MISER is the liaison between the Commonwealth and the U.S. Bureau of the Census and houses all the latter's data on Massachusetts.

Social and Demographic Research Institute (SADRI) in the department of Sociology is responsible for the maintenance and dissemination of various data archives to the UMass campus community, including local access to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and the National Center for Health Statistics Data archive (NCHS). Machmer Hall W34 University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 Phone: 413-545-3416; FAX: 413-545-0746; E-mail: weber@sadri.umass.edu

At Other Institutions or on the Internet

Data on the Net Search or browse listing of 872 Internet sites of numeric Social Science statistical data, data catalogs, data libraries, social science gateways, addresses and more.

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) A searchable database of social science data gathered by researchers across the country. This site provides both access to local UMass holdings (hundreds of SPSS Export files) and to the full ICPSR data archive housed at the University of Michigan. ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction, and offers training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. To ensure that data resources are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR preserves data, migrating them to new storage media as changes in technology warrant. In addition, ICPSR provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis and in conducting their research projects.

Social Science Data Collection The Data Services Unit of the Library of the University of California, San Diego. Mission is to provide easy access to raw numeric data, allowing each user to identify, locate, and obtain the data needed as quickly as possible for the computing environment of his or her choice.