Data Sources

The American National Election Studies (ANES) produces data on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists who want to better understand the theoretical and empirical foundations of national election outcomes. The center releases pre- and post-election waves and has aggregated a contiguous file across the entire timespan of the survey (the Time Series Cumulative file). Person-level.

The three major data infrastructure projects of the Minnesota Population center include: IPUMS-International; an integrated series of census microdata samples from 1960 to the present; IPUMS-USA, an integrated series of representative samples drawn from the U.S. censuses of the period from 1850 to 2000; and IPUMS-USA, which also includes American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2000 to 2005. IPUMS-CPS provides integrated data and documentation from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1962 to 2006. Other datasets include the North Atlantic Population Project, the National Historical Geographic Information System, and the Integrated Health Interview Series. Person-level.

The L2 Political Academic Voter File is a person-level dataset that represents the entire population of the United States that is registered to vote. L2 Political aggregates data from each of the states' public voter roles and supplements each record with modeled demographic variables, such as party affiliation, income, and many others. NYU licenses access to a map-based data extraction tool (VoterMapping) and also provides access to the underlying data files via NYU Research Workspace.

This tool is the primary way to extract data from the Census and from the various American Community Survey data products. Microdata and other related census products may be better discovered elsewhere on the U.S. Census website.

The GSS contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. Registration required. Person-level.

UltraViolet provides long-term open access to a broad range of digital materials, including data, software, lesson plans, journal articles, book chapters, and the many more types of output the NYU community creates and/or uses in the course of their work at the University. NYU community members can deposit materials here for free, to be curated and preserved in the long-term.

The Odum Institute maintains one of the oldest and largest catalog of machine-readable data in the U.S. It has an extensive collection of U.S. Census data, including one of the most complete holdings for 1970 Census files. Other major sources of data include the North Carolina State Data Center, which distributes North Carolina census data; and the National Center for Health Statistics.