INTER-UNIVERSITY CONSORTIUM FOR POLITICAL & SOCIAL RESEARCH
About the ICPSR
Through the Department of Sociology-Anthropology, the University of Minnesota Duluth maintains membership in the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which is operated by the University of Minnesota. This membership enables members of the University community to obtain a vast array of data for secondary data analysis regarding economic, education, health, international, legal, legislative, political, and other areas of social research.
Who to contact
John Arthur is the official representative for the ICPSR at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He may be contacted by e-mail jarthur@d.umn.edu or by phone at (218) 726-6358.
How to get data
Begin by browsing the ICPSR website to determine what data are of interest to you. Data are organized into topic areas. Also, the ICPSR site allows you to search the data by keywords. You can contact John Arthur at this stage, but browsing the holdings is generally the most efficient way to find the data you seek.
Next, look at the codebooks to see if the data really are suitable for your purposes. Codebooks are always available to the public, and most are available for download. Many of the datasets are also available for your immediate download along with command files for reading the data into popular statistics packages. If you would like to try accessing the data yourself, click here for additional information.
If you have found an interesting dataset that is restricted to registered users or you would like any assistance with the please contact John Arthur. Our goal is to make the data acquisition stage of your research as painless as possible.
ICPSR Summer Program
Each summer, the ICPSR hosts a series of workshops in quantitative methods. These workshops range from one to eight weeks in length. Most of the workshops are held at the University of Michigan. Some of the them involve a competitive admissions process (i.e., a limited number of applicants are accepted, based on interest, prior training, and potential for research contributions) and carry a stipend to help offset lodging and other costs. Other workshops are filled on a "first-come/first-served" basis. Nearly all of the workshops require payment of tuition or fees (many of the workshops can be taken for credit). Participation in the ICPSR Summer Program is open to faculty, P & S staff, and graduate students.
As a member institution, the University of Minnesota Duluth receives a small amount of funding to offset travel expenses for workshop participants affiliated with the University of Minnesota Duluth. For further information regarding travel assistance, please contact John Arthur.
Further information about the ICPSR Summer Program (including workshop dates and locations, application procedures, deadlines, and detailed descriptions of courses) is available at:
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/sumprog/
Additional Resources
Below is a list of some non-ICPSR data sources that researchers have found useful in the past.
Census Bureau. Commonly used Census data is available through the ICPSR. Additional information is available directly from the Census Bureau.
General Social Surveys (GSS). A convenient website to browse the data on-line and download a subset, or even to perform analyses (from frequencies to multiple regression) on-line.
The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and related National Longitudinal Surveys from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The UK Data Archive A service of The University of Essex, this archive is similar to the ICPSR with a European focus. In order to access the data, you will need to register, which is free for academic users.
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