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E-mail us: datahelp@gmu.edu
Website: dsc.gmu.edu
Location: 2701 Fenwick Library
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Subjects: Data, Statistics & GIS, Social Sciences
Use this guide to identify data sources to use for data analysis projects in which you need to analyze some data with software such as Excel, SPSS, or Stata. In these cases, you typically need to use microdata, which is data on "the characteristics of units of a population such as individuals, households, or establishments, collected by a census, survey, or experiment" (OECD).
Pages in this guide:
To access data in a ready-to-use table or to look up a statistic, use our companion to this guide:
Below are additional resources for locating data:
In addition to the InfoGuides with the "data" tag, look at the subject InfoGuides. Many of the subject guides have information on where to locate statistics for the guide's respective subject area. For example, the Economics InfoGuide has a section on places to find economic data.
Need ideas for your analysis? Search ICPSR's Bibliography of Data-related Publications. This resource indexes research articles that have used ICPSR data sets in their analysis. If you find an article of interest, you can try to replicate the results.
Note: once you locate an article, you will need to search the library to check if it subscribes and to get to the full-text.
Datasets used in the articles are available through ICPSR.
The Data Game by
This book introduces students to the collection, uses, and interpretation of statistical data in the social sciences. It would suit all social science introductory statistics and research methods courses. Separate chapters are devoted to data in the fields of demography, housing, health, education, crime, the economy, wealth, income, poverty, labor, business statistics, and public opinion polling, with a concluding chapter devoted to the common problem of ambiguity. Each chapter includes multiple case studies illustrating the controversies, overview of data sources including web sites, chapter summary and a set of case study questions designed to stimulate further thought.