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Finding & Using Data from ICPSR

The Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research is a depository of datasets for use in secondary data analysis.

Searching for Data Sets

From the Find Data tab, search by keyword, subject, investigator, or study number/name. You can also browse:

The search results are a list of datasets and/or documents.  Studies with downloadable data  will have links to a description and download link.  Some studies have segments, with an online analysis link,  which have been adapted for the beginning researcher and for classroom use.  The related literature link will provide a list of citations for publications based upon the dataset.

Search for variables

You can search specifically for variables and questions across studies in the Social Sciences Variables Database (SSVD).

The SSVD allows users to search through over 5 million variables, representing about 76% of ICPSR's holdings.

You can also browse variables by study or browse by series.

ICPSR searching tutorial