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ICPSR: Finding and Using Data from ICPSR

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

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UCI's ICPSR Representative

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Melissa Beuoy
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What is ICPSR?

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The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is the world's largest archive of digital social science data. ICPSR provides data and resources to a community of hundreds of institutions around the world including students, scholars, policy analysts, policymakers, government officials, and the media.

ICPSR is hosted by the University of Michigan, and includes over fifty years of clean, well-documented, curated social science and interdisciplinary data. The data is deposited by researchers and the government for use in secondary data analysis and in teaching.

UC Irvine is a member of this consortium. As such, we have full access to all of ICPSR's data and training resources.

 

Access ICPSR

ICSPR Data

ICPSR holds over 17,000 studies including over 5 million variables (aka the questions a researcher asks in a survey). Types of data include administrative data, surveys, video data, social media data, and more. Data searches can be filtered by topic, geographic location, subject terms/tags, funding agency, time period and more.

Over 40 academic disciplines use ICPSR data, including Anthropology,  Communications, Criminology, Economics, Education, Gender Studies, Geography, Information Science, Law, Medicine, Social Work, Sociology, Political Science, Psychology, Public Policy and more.

ICPSR Data Archive vs. openICPSR

openICPSR is a research data-sharing service that allows depositors to rapidly self-publish research data, enabling the public to access the data without charge. openICPSR data are distributed and preserved as-is, exactly as they arrive. 

In contrast, ICPSR professional staff review, curate and distribute ICPSR deposits. These data are enhanced, which includes distribution in multiple formats (e.g., SAS, SPSS, Stata, R, delimited). ICPSR has a rich 50-year history of curating and preserving data. 

ICPSR Training

ICPSR is more than a data archive.