SOCIAL SCIENCE
DATA RESOURCES
There is good data and a lot of bad, misinterpreted information floating around in this
Information Age of ours. To recognize the difference visit
STATS, a product of the
Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a non-partisan, non-profit research
organization in Washington, D.C., "devoted to the accurate use of scientific and
social research in public policy debate."
USEFUL
TOOLS
Need to create your own crosstabulations using the NORC
General Social Surveys? Try
Berkeley's
SDA tools.
Federal
Electronic Research and Review Extraction Tool (FERRET) from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census. Create your own demographic-
and income-based tables here.
NESSTAR (Networked Social Science Tools and Resources--the site's Explorer allows users to
retrieve data descriptions the data itself from the Danish Data Archive, the Finnish Social Science
Data Services, the Norweigian Social Science Data Services, and the
UK Data Archive.
Need to find out what a dollar in 1917 is worth in 2007? Examine postwar inflation rates in transportation rates in the South?
Take advantage of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Consumer Price Indices or EH.NET's "How Much Is That" websites. (For British conversions from 1264 to 2002, click
here.) Speaking of conversions, there are 8,100 conversions
and calculators at Online
Conversion.com--"Convert just about Anything to Anything else."
How far does your income go in other cities? Use CNNMoney's Salary Comparison Calculator.
So what do the polls say? For a great index of resources
check out Ruy Teixeira's (of the Economic Policy Institute) The
Pulse: A Consumer's Guide to Public Opinion Data on the Web
OLD
STANDBYS FROM THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
-
Site Map for FedStats.
Links to all data- maintaining federal agencies.
complete
2009
Statistical Abstract of the United States
CENTER
FOR ELECTRONIC RECORDS HOME PAGE
CIA
Publications, including the 2008
CIA World Factbook
Bureau
of Justice Statistics Publications
Search tools for the National Center for Education Statistics
(also check out new search engine here)
National Bureau of
Economic Research Homepage (from Harvard)
U Cal's Gov. Printing Office
Gate (for federal info)
Click here for complete breakdown
of federal government links
UNIVERSITY DATA RESOURCES
AND
LOCATORS
-
Yahoo
- Social Science:Data Collections
-
SINET Social
Indicators Network News
-
International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies
- Data on the Net--from UC San Diego, with nearly 900 "Internet Sites
of numeric Social Science statistical data, data catalogs, data libraries, social science gateways, addresses
and more" as of Fall 2000
- Statistical
Resources on the Web--University of Michigan
- University of Wisconsin-Madison's Data and Program Library Service, the repository of social science data
sets
- Princeton University's Survey Research Center
- James Cassell's "Internet Data Archives for Social Scientists"
-
Gene Shackman's Social Change page
--featuring links to theory, data and research about large scale long term political, economic and social systems change at the national and
international level
- GSSDIRS Home
Page
-
General
Social Survey Resources developed at Queens College
- Southern
Focus Polls codebooks and datasets (1992-97)--downloadable in both SAS
or SPSS portable formats--from UNC Chapel Hill
- American Religion Data
Archive (Purdue): downloadable files in ASCII, SPSS, and MicroCase
formats
-
SSDAN -
Census Data for the Classroom (CHIP formats)
-
Wisconsin
Longitudinal Study (begun 35 years ago, following members of the 1957 high
school graduating class
-
UCLA's
Data Archives Home
Data Sets
from UCLA
-
USC's Archival Research Center
-
Carnegie
Mellon U.'s StatLib---Datasets Archive
-
Yale Statlab
Home Page
University
of Virginia's Interactive Social Sciences Data Center
-
Northern Arizona
U.'s Social Research Lab
-
Social History Research
Lab, University of Minnesota
-
-
Australia National
University's Social Science Data Archives World Wide Web Server
-
Emigrants
to Liberia Colony sent by Amer. Colonization Society, 1820-43
RESOURCES
FROM FOUNDATIONS AND POLLING CENTERS
-
Pew Research
Center--interesting
monthly surveys here and raw data available for download six months
after its associated report is released
-
Public Agenda founded by Daniel Yankelovich and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance
- The Gallup
Organization--and it's worth a weekly stop to check out the Gallup
Tuesday Briefings
- Harris Polls Library
. Many of the Harris data sets can be downloaded from UNC's
Odum Institute
- PollingReport.com:
Looking for important trends in public opinion
- Political
Thinktanks
COMMERCIAL
DATA SITES
-
ICPSR - Home
Page
-
Gallup
Organization
-
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research--great
resource is site's iPoll, a full text retrieval system that allows one to sift through
the 350,000 questions asked in national public opinion surveys since 1935
- Sociometrics Social Science Electronic Data Library
-
Global
Computing, Inc. - U.S. State Home Pages
-
The Urban Institute Home
Page
-
The USA
CityLink Project
UNITED
NATIONS
AND
WORLD BANK
RESOURCES
-
UN Development Programme's
Human Development Report 2001--162 countries are ranked on such quality-
of-life indicators as life expectancy, wealth, and literacy
-
Social
Indicators of Development from the World Bank
-
United Nations Global Statistics--get your national-level data here
-
United
Nations CyberSchoolBus: Global Trends
-
United Nations
and other international organisations
-
UN Monthly
Bulletin of Statistics Online
-
UNESCO Institute for Statistics
-
The Progress of Nations
1995
-
The Progress
of Nations 1996: Table of Contents
-
The Progress of Nations
1997: Table of Contents
-
The Progress
of Nations 1998: Table of Contents
-
The Progress
of Nations 1999
-
The Progress
of Nations 2000
-
The World Bank Home
Page
-
PovertyNet Data on poverty from the World Bank
SOURCES
FOR FOREIGN AND INTERNATIONAL DATA SETS
Also check out the various international
measures of social rot.
FOR SHEER
TRIVIA
- Here's one for you Book of Lists aficionados: GLOBASTAT--view country rankings on more than 140
categories based on World Factbook data
- Harper's
Index
- Time magazine's Persons of the Year collection
- Amazon.com Purchase Circles--what
groups of people are buying in your home town, school, workplace, etc.
ADDITIONAL SOCIAL INDICATORS
It is intriguing the number of ways that historic climatic changes have been gauged, such as from
the width of tree rings, gases and pollen found deep in Greenland or Antarctic
ice, etc. What analogous measures do social scientists have to measure
changes in cultural and social orders? Below is a sampling of some of the
more unusual indices:
- 2002
Year-End Google Zeitgeist--Search patterns, trends and surprises
- The Fortean Times Weirdness Index
- the number of pawnbrokers for every bank in various cities
- cities' ratios of churches to bars
- the Hemline Index--the shorter the skirt
the higher the market
MEASURING
THE
WELL-BEING OF SOCIAL ORDERS
Since 1970, Fordham University social scientists have maintained an annual "Index of Social Health," which
supposedly gauges America's overall social well-being. It is a composite index comprised of such statistics as
unemployment rates, drug abuse, teenage suicide rate, the poverty rate of children and older persons,
homicides, alcohol-related highway fatalities,
and the gap between the nation's rich and poor. Below are other monitoring
resources:
-
The Progress
of Nations 1995
-
The Progress
of Nations 1996
-
The Progress
of Nations 1997
-
The Progress
of Nations 1998
-
The Progress
of Nations 1999
-
The Progress
of Nations 2000
-
The
Chaos Index
-
Josephson
Institute of Ethics
-
Public Agenda Online a rich resource
of information on such wide-ranging matters as abortion, childcare, crime, Social Security, welfare, and
right to die. Also site for
2002 study "Aggravating Circumstances: A Status Report on Rudeness in
America."
-
Independent Sector
-
National
Center for Children in Poverty
-
AA
The World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study Household Surveys
(lsmshome)
-
Current Events and End
Times Prophecy
-
Kearl's Death rates as Measures of
Social Life
OTHER WEB
RESOURCES
IN THIS SOCIOLOGICAL TOUR
-
Health Statistics & the Medical
Establishment
-
Demography
-
Resources for Political Sciences
and Election 2008 (including the think tanks)
-
Resources in Communication
Studies
-
Historical
Resources
WORLD SYSTEMS STUDIES
-
How to Research Transnational Corporations from Corporate Watch
MATTERS OF
ETHICS
-
Human
subjects and research ethics
Return
to A Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace
Zeus Eurobarometer
Database