Headings: !!Data Repositories and Sources !!!!Basic U.S. Data !!!!Compiled Data with Tables, Graphs and Summaries !!!!International Data !!!!Maps and Graphical Resources !!!!Interactional Data !!!!Other Qualitative Data Sources
The resources listed below include several types of material. Some, such as AmeriStat, pose interesting sociological questions and present already compiled data and a summary of the results. This type of resource offers convenient examples but is restricted in topic and interpretation to those chosen by source. One has to tailor the question to topics covered by these resources. Moreover, sometimes we found the discussions imprecise or misleading. We suggest that you read through the topics and text carefully to ensure that the topics meet your needs.
Other resources, such as the U.S. Statistical Abstract or data from the Census Bureau, offer data on a much wider range of topics and lend themselves to a much larger set of questions. However, the user often has to compile the data and create his or her own charts, graphs and analysis. Although this can be done easily in a program like Excel, it involves more preparation than the pre-compiled data.
Basic U.S. Numerical Data
Compiled U.S. Data with Tables, Graphs and Summaries
International Data
Maps and Graphical Resources
Interactional Data
Other Qualitative Data Resources
- Statistical Abstract of the United States provides general statistics on social and economic conditions in the United States. Data are compiled and updated annually. Current data tables often include information on previous years when relevant. The 1995 to 2003 editions are available online in PDF format. Selected international data are also included. There are related sources that provide summary information based on these data. See for example:
- California Statistical Abstract offers updated information on demographic, social, and economic conditions in California. The full version can be downloaded in PDF. All tables are available in Excel format. See for example:
- U.S. Census Bureau is the most comprehensive source for demographic and economic data about the US. There is a vast collection of data on the site. Data are often available for the country as a whole and at the state, county, and city level.
- American FactFinder is the Census Bureau's main data access tool.
- Take a look at Census Overview if you want to learn more about what the Census is, how data is collected, and what kinds of information are available. The Decennial Census Overview also has some useful information on how to understand Census data. The Census collects an overwhelming amount of data so a good strategy is to figure out if the Census Bureau or anyone else has already created a precompiled table, map, or report with the information you want. Don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to because aggregating or disaggregating raw Census data can be a lot of work.
- Demographics A wide variety of precompiled tables and maps are available here for Census 2000. There is no time series data.
- Thematic Maps - Census 2000: Select the variable of interest and you can create maps right down to the 3-digit zip code area. Useful for national and cross-state comparisons. You cannot create maps at the census tract level, making local and metropolitan area analysis difficult.
- For advanced users, you can go here for direct access to Census datasets
- The Census Briefs series includes accessible data analysis on numerous topics of interest. Examples include
- GeoLytics offers formatted bundles of 1970 through 2000 Census data for sale. These data have the advantage that they are made comparable across decades, and easy to search, tabulate and display. UCLA licenses these data for use by faculty, students and staff. Contact David Deckelbaum ( ddeckelb@library.ucla.edu ), the Young Research Library Cartographic Information Librarian, for more information.
- FedStats is the U.S. government's portal to data from over 100 data collection agencies. There is so much here that it can be somewhat bewildering to use if you don't know exactly what data set you are looking for.
- The Center for Disease Control (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics offers:
- National Vital Statistics Data and Reports
- FASTATA is a detailed list of health-related summary data by topic area at the national and state level.
- Health, U.S. is an annual report on national trends in health statistics. This page also includes 1993-2003 data in Excel format.
- Data WareHouse offers a list of tabulated and micro-level health-related data.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides data on a wide range of topics, including employment and compensation, prices and living conditions, productivity and technology, and regional resources. You can access these data at the BLS data page.
- General Social Survey The General Social Survey (GSS) is an (bi)annual survey of U.S. households conducted by the National Opinion Research Center. The survey includes social, cultural and political indicators from 1972 to 2002. The data are cross-sectional, with a new sample in every wave. The data are easy to use. The link above leads to a web-based tool for reviewing and choosing variables and extracting and analyzing data via the web.
- IPUMS: The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series offers census micro-data for social and economic research. The samples include data from 1850 to 2000, and offer a unique opportunity to study change over time in the U.S. The data set includes variables on household, family, economic, and education characteristics, income, migration, disability, veteran status and much more. For a full listing of variables, go here.
- CensusScope is a web-based repository of recent census data on US demographic trends created by the Social Science Data Analysis Network at the University of Michigan. The site includes maps, graphs and exportable trend data by state, county, and metropolitan region.
- ICPSR The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction, and offers training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use.
- National Archive of Criminal Justice Data offers crime and justice data from a variety of state and federal agencies. Data can be downloaded or analyzed online.
- Historical Demographic, Economic, and Social Data describe the population and economy of U.S. states and counties from 1790 to 1960. Full data are available at ICPSR.
- Sociology Charts and Graphs A collection of charts and tables on a range of topics maintained by Russell Long at Delmar College. Includes a number of tables focused on Texas.
- Social Science Data on the Net is an extensive and searchable database of over 360 sites with statistical data. You can look through the Data Library and the list of 52 Data Archives. Maintained by the UCSD Library.
- The Young Research Library Reference Department web page lists data and statistical resources on the web of interest to sociologists. See in particular:
- Social Sciences Electronic Data Library (Sociometrics Corporation) Includes over 300 data sets from 200 different studies on topics including: AIDS/STD, Disability, American Family, Adolescent Pregnancy, Aging, and Child Well-Being and Poverty.
- American Religion Data Archive is an extensive data resource on religion in America. Includes access to maps and reports and direct file access to nearly a hundred surveys and studies on the topic.
- AmeriStat provides descriptive information about the U.S. population, presented in short write-ups and informative graphs. Topics include: Children, Education, Labor/Employment, Fertility, Foreign-Born, Income/Poverty, Marriage/Family, Migration, Mortality, Older Population, Estimates/Projections, Race/Ethnicity. Whenever possible, trends are shown in five-year intervals from 1970 to 2000. Single-year data are shown for more recent years, with special coverage of the 2000 Census. The data can be downloaded in Excel or text file format. See also AmeriStat's About Us page.
- Features: Brief articles present key features of the American population accompanied by easy-to-read graphs and downloadable data. Data has been compiled and tabulated for the user. Only a basic level of numeracy is required to appreciate the articles. The site also includes longer reports written by the Population Research Bureau. Most articles are accompanied by data tables that can be downloaded in Excel or text format (Sample Article about Interracial Dating) and charts that are suitable for handouts or slideshow presentations.
- A Word of Caution: Some summaries describe a correlation between variables rather than a causal relationship, and may therefore allow the reader to misinterpret the true sources of the correlation or draw misleading conclusions (see, for example, Marriage Boosts Individual Earnings). These examples, however, also provide the opportunity to teach the basics of data interpretation. Unfortunately, only the compiled data are available. Links are usually provided to the original data source, but attempting to draw additional information from the original data source may be difficult.
- KIDS COUNT is an online database, maintained by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, designed "to track the status of children in the U.S." While the focus is on children, the data may be of use in many areas of sociology. Measures include items such as infant mortality, teen birth rate, high-school dropouts, income, parental employment, education. Currently, there are four different databases hosted on the site, each with its own web interface. They are, however, in the process of implementing a common web interface and set of capabilities across these data sets.
- The site can generate Profiles (summary statistics), Line graphs (for temporal patterns), Maps, Rankings (frequency distributions as tables and graphs) and Raw Data (Excel and text format). The data coverage varies but mainly includes the 1990 and 2000 Censuses and some intermediate years. A comparison of the coverage of the four data sets can be found here.
- SSDAN has created two supplementary tools to add functionality to the analysis of the KIDS COUNT Data.
- The Census Briefs series, which includes accessible data analysis on numerous topics of interest. Examples include
- CensusScope is a web-based repository of recent census data on US demographic trends created by the Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN) at the University of Michigan. The site includes maps, graphs and exportable trend data by state, county, and metropolitan region.
- The World Bank maintains several international data sets including:
- The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) publishes a wealth of data as part of its Global Human Development Reports Series. For example, the 2003 report
is available for download]. The most useful data can be found in one of the appendices; see either the Millennium Development Indicators or the Human Development Indicators. The former are generally future policy goals while the latter are standard development indices such as life expectancy or literacy.
- International Data Base (IDB) provided by the U.S. Bureau of the Census offers demographic and socioeconomic data for 227 countries and areas of the world. Summary statistics can be displayed for a selected country, by different sorting criteria, or downloaded in a spreadsheet format. Data can also be aggregated online. One can use web-based tools to produce, for example, population pyramids or rankings of countries. Interested users can also download the whole database and necessary software to their local computers for free.
- Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) provides a clickable map to social science data archives from across Europe.
- The International Stratification and Mobility File is a collection of standardized survey data files on social stratification and mobility, with particular emphasis on respondents' own status (education, occupation etc.) and his/her social and economic background. The file was created and is maintained by Harry Ganzeboom (Free University of Amsterdam; H.Ganzeboom@scw.vu.nl), and Donald Treiman (University of California,Los Angeles; treiman@dudley.sscnet.ucla.edu) and Elizabeth Stephenson (University of California,Los Angeles; libbie@ucla.edu). The data file itself is available only upon request, but the web page offers immediate access to some other useful resources. These include a collection of 149 Intergenerational Occupational Mobility Tables and tools to standardize international occupational codes including conversion files for some US standard occupational codes into ISCO (the international standard classification of occupations in either the 1968 or the 1988 version).
- The World Health Organization is the United Nations health agency. The organization focuses on health and human rights, mental health and food safety around the world. The organization provides access to many research-related resources, including:
- Data on health-related information.
- See, for example, the WHO Mortality Database, which contains raw data files (not user friendly) and more accessible premade tables that can be used to calculate death rates and to explore causes of death.
- Also see the WHO Global Atlas of the Health Workforce. By clicking on the data query link, users can obtain data about the composition of the health workforce (i.e., the number of doctors, nurses, dentists, etc.). This can be done for a large area (the whole UN world) or broken down by continent, region or country. Users can also create interactive maps about these same topics in a user-friendly framework.
- Geographic Information Tools for mapping health-related data. See, for example, the Global Health Atlas, with links to a user-friendly interactive mapping tool that can be used to map diseases, the location of schools, etc. The Global Health Atlas also has links to ready-made maps on these same topics, that can be broken down by region and specific topic.
- A multimedia center with photo, video, audio and Flash animation files that can be used to lean about a particular health-related topic or about WHO sponsored events.
- Electronic Map Library William Bowen at CSU Northridge has created one of the most comprehensive collections of informational maps on the Internet. He has hundreds of US, California, and metro region maps with information on topics like poverty, segregation, income, and education. For example, skim through the dozens of Los Angeles maps. Note that most of the maps are based on 1990 data.
- SEDAC (Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) at Columbia maintains an impressive collection of Data Resources, Interactive Applications and Information Resources on human interactions and the environment. The resources are highly graphical with a rich collection of global and international-level data. Among the interactive applications are:
- Demographic Data Viewer is an online mapping tool that allows you to create highly detailed and customizable information maps for 220 demographic variables from 1990 Census data. Regions can be mapped from the national level down to the census tract level, making this a great tool for local and metropolitan level analyses. You can also download the data for any map that you create. There is unfortunately no save feature for the maps you create but you can use the Windows Print-Screen function to save your graphs as an image file. See the tutorial for more information. For example, this sample map of the Hispanic Population in Los Angeles - 1990 took about 15 minutes to create and save.
- US-Mexico Demographic Data Viewer allows interactive mapping of the US-Mexico border region for over 200 socioeconomic variables. The site includes both a tutorial and documentation.
- The University of Texas Online Map Collection offers a comprehensive online library of current and historical maps. The library has more than 5000 maps available online. The collection includes:
- ESRI, maker of ArcGIS, offers downloadable data from their website. For example, see the free web downloads of Census 2000 TIGER/Line Data.
- The Young Research Library online reference collection offers a list of online maps and GIS resources. Resources include online gazetteers, contemporary and historical maps, Los Angeles area resources, GIS resources, and aerial photographs and satellite images.
Although we have focused on quantitative data in the initial phase of work on this project, we would like to develop resources that facilitate the hands-on analysis of qualitative data as well. The resources listed here are, for the time being, simply an initial gesture in that direction; they barely scratch the surface of what is available. Suggestions for resources that might be included here are welcome (brubaker@soc.ucla.edu ).
- eHRAF Collection of Ethnography is a cross-cultural database containing over 350,000 pages of information on all aspects of the cultural and social aspects of life of more than one hundred different cultures. Information is organized by cultures; all sources are indexed at the paragraph level. The database is maintained and updated by The Human Relations Area Files, Inc. – a research agency of Yale University. Moreover, eHRAF offers a collection of web-based teaching resources including workbooks, class assignments, individual papers, and group projects. The resource is primarily designed for anthropologists and archaeologists, but is also relevant to sociologists.
- Qualidata provides access to a wide range of (mostly) European qualitative data sets.
- An article on using diaries in social research, published by Social research update by an effort of the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK.
- Describes the method, points to software used to analyze diaries and other biographical documents, discusses the issue of archiving biographical documents, and lists many useful reference of past studies based on diaries.
- Here is another article on archiving of qualitative data from the same source.
- Information on the use of photographs in social research - an article published by Social research update by an effort of the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK. The paper describes the main features of the use of photography in social science research and references other sources to expand on the topic.
- Vanderbilt University has the world's largest archive of television news. The collection holds more than 30,000 evening news broadcasts from the major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) plus other news-related programming. The database has an on-line search engine, and selected tapes may be obtained for a fee.
- U.S. Newspapers Archives on the Web is a collection of links to news archives organized by state. This site also offers a collection of international news archives.
- LexisNexis has a searchable database of news transcripts. Accessible from UCLA campus (and other subscribing organizations') networks and Bruin Online only.
- Newsbank provides full-text access to 269 individual newspaper titles, including 47 California titles.
History
Last edited Monday, 12 December 2005 at 13:34 by mj
http://www.wiki.org -- Wiki home:
DataInTheClassroom
DataRepositories
as a whole and for Kentucky 
