Finding Data Collections

Data Collections, also known as Data Sets, evolved through the data sharing ethic of social scientists. These collections of data enable researchers to analyze data they did not collect. Much of this data also provides "codebooks" that give conceptual meaning to numerical codes and describe the process of measurement in detail.

American Fact Finder
This set from the U.S. Census Bureau contains a variety of information from household income to ethnic and racial profiles of various groups across the country.

Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA)
CESSDA 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 on the Net
Search or browse this listing from U. of California, San Diego of 873 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
Search for words or phrases in the title field, by investigator, by study number or in all fields of this huge collection of data sets at the University of Michigan. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a member of ICPSR. Contact Professor Doug Anderton for access to this database.

Networked Social Science Tools and Resources (NSSTAR)
NESSTAR Explorer is a tool to find data across organizational and national boundaries and for browsing and downloading both data and metadata.

World Bank Research Data Sets
Researchers compiled these datasets for the World bank, which provides them free to encourage the creation of new knowledge. These examples demonstrate this resource's broad knowledge. The Soviet Economic Decline, 1928-1990; Poverty in India, 1951-1994; Africa's Growth Tragedy:Policies and Ethnic Divisions, 1960s-1980s in 160 countries.