SocSci-Data

Over the summer, the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has overhauled its web site; see the ICPSR Announcements section Visual Design and Navigation.

As the new academic year begins, beginning to intermediate students of statistics (and their instructors) may be interested in practicing with "real-life" datasets without having to learn statistical data analysis software (such as Stata or SPSS) first^*, and being at a computer where such software is available.

For this, ICPSR offers Analyze Data Online using the Survey Documentation and Analysis (SDA) system, through which over 500 studies can be accessed - public opinion polls, surveys of prison inmates, voting behavior, medical and demographic information from hospital discharge records, and surveys of consumer attitudes and expectation are just a few examples. For these studies,SDA offers frequencies, crosstabulations, comparisons of means, correlations, multiple regression, and more types of analyses - all through a web browser.


Note that as of early Sep. 2009, the video tutorial on the Analyze Data Online page still shows the pre-recent-change of the ICPSR web site look at the beginning, but the SDA functions shown further into it are those currently available.

The Foundation for Child Development (FCD) announces a request for proposals for its PreK-3rd Research and Evaluation Small Grants Program. A maximum of two awards of up to $50,000 each will be awarded to researchers proposing to use one or more datasets from the PreK-3rd Data Resource Center. The deadline for proposals is November 2, 2009.

With travel budgets severely reduced at many member instituitons, ICPSR has, for the first time, made the Biennial Official Representatives (OR) Meeting in 2009 a virtual one - and with that, it is also is open to everyone, and free! Sessions include: Best Practices in Documentation; Web 2.0 Tools for Visualization; Graphical Displays of Quantitative Information; Tools that Support Data Analysis; Disclosure Risk Analysis; Census 2010 & American Community Survey; American National Election Studies & SETUPS; the Integrated Fertility Survey Series; Using Data in Teaching; Delivering Research Opportunities to Undergraduates; Tools for bringing data into the classroom; Online Data Analysis Tools; Quantitative Literacy: Assessment and Enhancement; and Online Tools to Access Restricted-use Data.


Go to ICPSR 2009: Real Data in a Virtual World for details and registration.

If all goes to plan and the involved platforms and services all play nice with each other, this and future postings to this blog will automagically be turned into tweets on Twitter. Thanks to Themba for the tip.

Following the release of its new web site, ICPSR has just announced a webinar focusing on the changed features.

ICPSR has announced the winners of its 2009 round of Undergraduate Research Paper Competitions. Congratulations to Yale May 2009 graduate Nathaniel Becker, whose paper The Transmission of Political Ideologies through Social Networks: an Empirical Approach won the Minority Data Resource Center (MDRC) competition - the second year in a row for a Yale student to do so, after Sarah Ireland's paper Intergenerational Class Mobility by Race: Can the Black Middle Class Reproduce Itself? in 2008. Nathaniel used the Houston Area Survey, 1982-2007 from the ICPSR data archive.

This brief video clip shows an example of using ICPSR's browse-to-a-country-by-map feature to retrieve studies related to that country; the Save Your Search function at the bottom of the right column then provides options for capturing future additions of, or changes to, ICPSR studies matching that selection. This can be done regardless of how you went about making your selection of studies, Save Your Search captures the results thereof. The options are described in How can I be notified of new resources/studies that are in my field of interest?. This is a new function, so please feel free to comment with observations, problems, tips, tricks, ...

ICPSR's recently redesigned web site also has a new search engine, in which the automatic stemming of search terms to retrieve partial-word matches, as described on the Searching Tips page, currently does not work, unfortunately. So, for instance, a search for psych (to find psychologists, psychiatry, etc.) or a search for pregnan (to find pregnant, pregnancy, etc.) currently retrieves no results. In the Social Science Variables Database, which now contains over a million variables, the same searches will retrieve results, but those are (as far as I could ascertain) only literal matches of the search term, as found in abbreviations in variable labels and such. Since the Boolean OR operator is not supported, the only workaround for the time being appears to run multiple searches for all forms of a word, e.g., one for pregnant, one for pregnancy, etc., to be sure to find all matching studies/variables. Any updates will be provided as additions to this entry.