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.

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.

DataWeb
DataWeb provides access across the Internet to demographic, economic, environmental, health, and other databases housed in different systems in different agencies and organizations.

EconData.Net
Provides a wide variety of region-specific economic data. It also provides 1,000 links to socioeconmic data and sources, and ranks the 10 best sites for this information.

FedStats
Contains statistics from more than 70 agencies in the federal government.

HUDUSER Datasets
Original electronic data sets generated by The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) Office of Policy Development and Research's data collection efforts, including the American Housing Survey, HUD median family income limits, as well as microdata from research initiatives on topics such as housing discrimination, the HUD-insured multifamily housing stock, and the public housing population.

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.

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.

Online Data Archive
The collection includes major surveys from a variety of distributors, U.S. government data, and locally produced archival datasets.

Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center: SEDAC
Socioeconomic data, environmental, population, and more.

Dataverse Network Project
An open-source, digital library of quantitative research data.