ICPSR & Other Social Science Data Sources

I hope you find this guide to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and other social science data resources useful. Please contact Patricia Condon if you have questions about using any of these resources.

UNH is a member of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). ICPSR

• was established in 1962.
• is the world's largest archive of computerized social sciences data and surveys.
• covers a broad range of social science disciplines including political science, sociology, history, economics, education, criminal justice, gerontology, demography, public health, law, and international relations.
• ICPSR hosts thematic data collections sponsored by other agencies organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau and other federal agencies.

Our membership allows students, faculty and staff at UNH to download ICPSR data and documentation from both on and off campus.

ICPSR provides numeric raw data for analysis. You need to use statistical software such as SPSS, Stata, R, or Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA), the latter available at ICPSR. SDA offers some basic analysis options online for selected data collections; click on the Online Analysis link to access SDA. Some statistical software programs are available on the Student Computing Clusters at UNH.

If you are looking for statistical publications, reports or ready-made tables or statistics, UNH subscribes to a number of statistics and polls resources as well as resources for statistics and data in business and economics. Please Ask a Librarian if you need assistance with finding statistics. The UNH library has identified additional sources for data sets.

To access the data sets, users need to first set up a MyData Account.  You'll need to create a MyData account from a computer on the UNH campus network. Once you have created the account from a computer on campus you'll be able to login from any computer.

To keep your account active, you should log in from time to time from a computer on the UNH network.

Some ICPSR information and services are openly available including finding data, information on data management and curation, and depositing digital data.