The Social Science Libraries and Information Services maintains the Yale Roper Collection, which may be used by students, faculty and staff of Yale University. The Collection contains indexes, codebooks, and computer files received from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research in Storrs, CT.

The Roper Center collects public opinion data from the major polling organizations in the United States, as well as some polls from foreign countries. It also has a large historical collection of surveys by the US Information Agency conducted in other countries. Each survey typically contains questions on a number of topics rather than having a particular subject focus. The Roper Center was founded in 1946 and contains data from the mid-1930s to the present.

The Yale Roper Collection includes a complete set of the documentation for polls acquired by the Roper Center from its founding through 1984. Since 1984, polls have been added as requested by users. The Yale Roper Collection consists of questionnaires or codebooks stored in file cabinets at the Social Science Library, 140 Prospect St. The files are arranged by country, within country by polling organization, and within polling organization by date. Recent datafiles in the collection are stored on the Statlab server and are cataloged in StatCat. Contact Social Science Reference for information about accessing recent or historical datafiles in the collection.

Data in the Yale collection are available to faculty, students, and staff of Yale University. Users with other affiliations should apply to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, PO Box 440, Storrs, CT 06268 or phone +1 860 486 4440.

Search for questions and poll topics

iPOLL (produced by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research - available on the Yale network)
Contains nearly 400,000 questions and responses from national public opinion surveys since 1935. The file includes sources in opinion polling such as Gallup, Harris, Roper; ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC; Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal. The database is also available through LexisNexis (click Reference, then Polls and Surveys).

• To obtain the numeric datafile for a survey, check StatCat to see if the dataset is already available at Yale. If it is not, contact Social Science Reference to order the data from the Roper Center.
• Note: iPOLL also contains questions from polls that are not held by the Roper Center; contact Social Science Reference for help finding a source for such datasets.