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Vol. 3, No. 1 Fall 2005
Patty MacDonald, Head of Reference
John Breitmeyer, Reference Librarian
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
(ICPSR) maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social
science data for research and instruction. This data can be used
by students and faculty for various research projects and purposes.
From their web site, ICPSR offers online tutorials to assist researchers
in identifying relevant data for analysis and in conducting their
research projects.
Before a user can download most data from ICPSR, they need to
follow a simple procedure to create a "MyData" account within
ICPSR. Although some data in ICPSR are readable online (in a format
called DAS), or readable in Excel, most data from ICPSR are in
ASCII format, and require special statistical software to read.
ICPSR currently provides setup files for SAS, SPSS and Stata,
three of the more commonly used analytical software packages for
the social sciences. Some tutorial-style information is provided
for SAS and SPSS. See instructions
for downloading data.
Access to ICPSR used to be limited to the Center for Social & Community Research
at Loyola, but now the library is providing direct web access for both college communities.
Try the database for your own research and benefit from ICPSR's mission
to the social sciences.
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ICPSR