The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) holds thousands of archived data sets available for use to member organizations such as the University of Oregon. To find data, users may look for data sets in the Guide to Resources and Services (now available only on cd-rom), or search their holding at the ICPSR Web site.

The Data Services Lab is able to order data from the ICPSR and in many cases can download the data from the web. Users interested in analyzing data from ICPSR must contact Adam Lake, the DSL GTF, to request ICPSR data.

• Search:  To Search the ICPSR archive, go to the ICPSR homepage and choose ARCHIVE from menu at top of the screen.  At the archive page there are three ways to search the ICPSR holdings:
  1. Browse Subject:  If you see subject listing on the right hind side of the screen that you think might have the type of data you're looking for, you can click one to view a lengthy listing of data holdings categorized under that subject.
  2. Search Holdings:  Here you can enter a few words to search for, but be sure to select appropriate search type from the drop down menu.  You can start out searching by "Title".   This will give you any studies so particular to your topic that it actually appears in the titles.  If, however, you only get a few or no results, you should redo your search by selecting "Abstract" from the drop down menu.  This will give you a listing of all studies that contain your search terms in the abstract, which is a summary of the content of the dataset.  "PI" stands for principal investigator and unless you know the name of the researcher that would have collected the type of data you're interested in, this will not be very useful.
  3. Study Number:  If you know the exact study you want and its study number, you can quickly retrieve it.  Most people, however, do not already have this information when beginning a search.
• Abstracts: The abstracts accociated with each study number should provide enough information for you to decide whether or not the data set is appropriate for your interests.
• Study Number: Once you have found the study that you are interested in, make a note of the study number. In some cases a series of data sets may be available under one study title, but with different study numbers--you need to know the study number for each data set you request.  Beware: If the data sets you are interested in have different study numbers, this may indicate that the data sets are substantially different in methodology and/or format, even if they are in the same series collected by the same organization under the same study title.
• Codebook: It is your responsibility to thoroughly understand the documentation associated with the data set.  From netscape, you may be able to look at the codebook by clicking on it. (Some codebooks are in .gzip form. If you can not unzip the compressed file once you've downloaded it and if the file is too large for you to download in the uncompressed format, contact DSL for help.).  DSL recommends keeping a copy of the codebook accessible (this can be done by copying it to your personal computer, making a bookmark in Netscape, or making a hard copy of the file) to assist in the variable definition stage.  If the codebook is not available on-line and if DSL does not already have a copy of it on file, it will take about two weeks for us to receive it from ICPSR once we have ordered it.
• Read Through the Codebook: From the codebook, you should be able to (at least roughly), understand the methodology used to collect the data.  This will be important for choosing the variables you want from the data set and ensuring that the data will be valid for your analysis.