Largest Archive of Social Science Research Data (ICPSR) Now Available

Recently Library and Technology Services initiated a membership in the world's largest archive of computer-readable social science data, managed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

It is a new and exciting resource on campus, both for teaching and research. It also provides access to some “classroom-ready” datasets with instructional material that ICPSR has made available to assist with the incorporation of quantitative analysis into teaching.

With this membership, faculty and students now have direct and free access to download data resources as well as to utilize ICPSR's expert user support and distinguished summer training programs in quantitative methods. The resource website notes that “ICPSR data holdings cover a wide range of social science areas such as population, economics, education, health, social and political behavior, social and political attitudes, history, crime, aging, and substance abuse."

For instance, Professor Tony O’Brien in the College of Business and Economics has already made use of it for research on the economic history of African Americans in the postbellum South.
Users can set up a free "MyData" account on the ICPSR website to facilitate downloading analysis-ready data in multiple software formats such as SPSS, SAS and Stata.

As the ICPSR faculty “official representative” on campus, I will be happy to speak with users who may have questions about the ICPSR collection or policies. For assistance with downloading and accessing the data, LTS computing consultant for the College of Arts and Sciences Bill Bettermann (84619, wab3@lehigh.edu) or the ICPSR User Support Group (734) 647-2200) are ready to assist.

ICPSR is accessible from the Libraries Database Finder page at http://databases.lib.lehigh.edu/finder/ and from the ASA catalog.  

-- Ziad Munson

Article posted November 20, 2008
 

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