Ithaca College

As a member of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Ithaca College joins with over 550 colleges and universities in the acquisition, preservation, and distribution of social science data.

Stephen Sweet (Department of Sociology) and John Henderson (Library) are campus representatives of the ICPSR and are happy to help you locate and retrieve data provided by the ICPSR.

Are you or your students interested in determining the average age at which men versus women begin smoking? What if you need to know whether age at marriage differs between your region of the country and other regions, or about differences in political attitudes based on age, gender, education, race, or ethnicity? These and countless other questions can be answered by studies in the ICPSR data holdings. The unique contribution of the ICPSR is that it supplies the numeric raw data used to create publications, reports, and figures. Thus, you can analyze some of the richest quantitative data in existence, and also provide your students with the same opportunity.

ICPSR, established in 1962, provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction and offers training in quantitative methods. To ensure that data are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR preserves data, migrating them to new storage media as changes in technology warrant. ICPSR also provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis to conduct secondary research and write articles, papers, and theses.

In addition to the general archive, ICPSR hosts a number of special topic archives, including the Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA), Child Care and Early Education (Research Connections), Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS), Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR), the International Archive of Education Data (IAED), the Minority Data Resource Center (MDRC), the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA). Data from all of these topical archives are conveniently available at the ICPSR website.

All staff, students, and faculty have access to the extensive ICPSR data holdings via any campus computer. Access is direct and quick by accessing the ICPSR website:

ICPSR (www.icpsr.umich.edu)

First-time users will be asked to create an ICPSR MyData account; thereafter, you will need your e-mail address and password to download data. Local assistance in locating, accessing, and analyzing ICPSR data is available; contact personnel are listed on the ICPSR web page.

The ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research offers courses in research design, statistics, data analysis, and social science methodology. Instruction is for beginning or advanced students of quantitative methods, and the program attracts university faculty and researchers, graduate students, and nonacademic research scientists from around the world.

To learn more, contact Stephen Sweet or John Henderson, or visit the ICPSR website.