Data Services for Social Sciences

Data Services

Data Services in the Bartle Library Reference Department provides numeric data for social science research. For assistance contact Dave Vose, ICPSR Official Representative, Dave Vose, (607) 777-4907.

Services include:

  • Maintaining university affiliations to ICPSR and New York State Data Center Program (U.S. Bureau of the Census).
  • Locating and purchasing, data resources for research and instructional use.
  • Transferring data between platforms and formats using tools such as Stat/Transfer.

Numeric Data Available to the BU Community

ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)

  • ICPSR Data Archive BU
only
    ICPSR data can be downloaded by BU researchers that access ICPSR through the campus network or remotely by authenticating for BU
only resources from the Libraries' web pages.
  • Statisitical manuals are available in the Data Services area. Study codebooks may be downloaded from the ICPSR web site. Print copies of many codebooks not yet online are also available in Data Services.

Datastream (Access on Internet via workstation in the Data Services area.)

  • Historical, global coverage of equities, stock markets, commodities, futures, currencies, options, bond markets, company financials, and economic data.

Great American History Machine on CD-ROM (Located in the Data Services area)

  • The Great American History Machine provides access to U.S. census data, 1790-1990, and Presidential and Congressional election data for the 19th and 20th centuries.
  • Documentation to assist in extracting data, creating maps, and deriving variables are available in Data Services.

Historical Statistics of the United States on CD-ROM: Colonial Times to 1970 - Bicentennial Edition (Located in Data Services area)

  • Includes over 12,500 statistical time series. Errors in the 1975 printed edition have been corrected using the information in the Errata sheet dated February 1977.
  • See Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 [Bartle Reference HA206 .S82, 2 volumes] to see the contents of the printed version. This source is still the standard source for quantitative indicators of American history.
  • A User's Guide is available to assist in locating and viewing tables, and extracting data.

Wistat (Women's Indicators and Statistics) (Located in the Data Services area)

  • Detailed national statistics on a wide range of social and economic topics, disaggregated by sex, for 206 countries or areas of the world.
  • A United Nations publication covering from 1970 to 1999

World Development Indicators on CD-ROM (Located in the Data Services area)

  • Covers population and demographics, labor and employment, education, health and nutrition, land and energy use, urbanization, emissions, national accounts (local currency), national accounts (US$), national accounts (derived), other production indicators, trade, government finance, monetary, balance of payments, external debt, state-owned enterprises, private sector, prices and exchange rates, tax and trade policies, financial depth, infrastructure and communication, and development assistance and aid.
  • WDI Indicators - over 500 indicators for over 150 economies.

Sites for Locating and Downloading Data

1990 PUMS Utilities
Create customized subsets from the rectangularized 1% PUMS files for the 50 states and the District of Columbia, compute a variety of descriptive statistics for variables in the data files, and do crosstabulations for user defined combinations of two or three variables in the data sets. The system will create the customized subset and prepare it for ftp delivery.

American FactFinder
Create tables or maps and download data from the Census of Population and Housing, Economic Census, or American Community Survey.

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)
"The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
(CSES) is a collaborative program of research among election study teams from around the world. Participating countries include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies. The resulting data are deposited along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables. The studies are then merged into a single, free, public dataset for use in comparative study and cross-level analysis."

IPUMS: Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples
Contains twenty-five high-precision samples of the American population drawn from thirteen federal censuses from 1850-1990. Some of these samples have existed for years, and others were created specifically for this database.

Data FERRET: Federal Electronic Research and Review Extraction Tool
Data mining and extraction tool that allows you to select and recode variables, develop and customize tables and graphs. Software requires download. See list of available datasets.

Social Science Data on the Net
Mega-site! Excellent searchable and browsable site of over 400 links to numeric data for downloading, plus much more. Includes access to data from major government agencies, universities, and research institutes.

StatCat
StatCat (formerly the Social Science Data Archive Catalog) includes information about numeric datasets in the Yale Social Science Data Archive, as well as datasets available in the Yale University Library and on the Internet.

EconData (INFORUM)
A source for several hundred thousand economic time series data at the U.S. National, State/Local, and International levels.

EconData.Net
Links to over 1,000 public, university, and private sources of regional socioeconomic data.

New York State Data Center
Provides access to the various statistical series for and about New York State's economy and population including estimates. Download data as spreadsheet files.

Online Data Archive
Datasets and documentation free to download from the Data and Program Library Service, University of Wisconsin.

Instructional Datasets and On-line Textbooks

HyperStat Online
An introductory statistics book with other good links by David M. Lane, Rice University.

StatNotes: An Online Textbook
An online methods textbook by David Garson, a political science faculty member at North Carolina State.

Research Methods Knowledge Base
A textbook for an introductory course in social research methods. Author William Trochim is a professor at Cornell University.

SPSS version 11.0
Tutorial for the Windows version

Teaching Resources Depository Home Page
Created by faculty in the California State system and includes teaching modules and downloadable datasets (some are restricted access).

On-line Assistance

Data Library -- Introduction to Data Handling
Includes advice on reading and using codebooks and sample extractions using SAS and SPSS.

Selecting Statistics
A "how to" by William Trochim. Includes a glossary.

Statistical List Subscription Service
An easy way to subscribe or unsubscribe to statistically-oriented e-mail discussion lists.

What You Need to Know to Write a SAS Program
From Columbia University.