Research Guides: Social Research and Public Policy: Data & Statistics

Finding Social Policy Statistics

Datasets are collections of quantitative or other numeric data gathered during surveys, interviews or other means that can be analyzed using specialized software such as Stata, SPSS, or R. This section list both publicly available and subscription datasets relevant to social research and public policy studies.

Frequently Used Data Sources

Sage Data This link opens in a new window
Sage Data aggregates datasets sourced from reputable public and private organizations, such as OECD, China Data Online, the United Nations, and the U.S. Census. It covers topics across many subject areas, including education, population and income, industry, commerce, trade, housing and construction. Users can create custom extracts and download files in delimited, SAS, or shapefile formats.

Harvard Dataverse
Dataverse is the world's largest open source research data repository of social science research datasets. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others' work more easily. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive academic credit and web visibility.

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) This link opens in a new window
ICPSR is a social science repository that includes curated data sets pertaining to many disciplines within the social sciences. ICPSR contains original codebooks and descriptions of methodology, offers multiple file format downloads, and links data to relevant scholarly research. Users can search at the variable level and trace datasets to their use in academic publications. The archive also includes data-driven learning guides for those teaching with data.
Users need to login to access. Use the single sign-in with Google and when prompted, use NetID credentials.

IPUMS
IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services available free of charge.
The Quality of Government (QOG) Institute
The QOG Institute at the University of Gothenburg studies good governance and corruption on a global scale. QoG provides a range of datasets available for free, and data visualization tools. QoG Standard Dataset contains the most qualitative variables from the Standard Dataset. The QoG Expert Survey is a dataset based on our survey of experts on public administration around the world, available in an individual dataset and an aggregated dataset covering 107 countries.The QoG OECD dataset covers countries who are members of the OECD. The EU Regional Data consists of 450 variables from Eurostat and other sources, covering three levels of European regions - country, major socio-economic regions and basic regions for the application of regional policies.

Statista This link opens in a new window
Statista aggregates data on markets, industry, politics, economics, and population. Users can export datasets in a variety of formats. Sources include trade publications, market and opinion research institutions, government sources, business and economic databases, reference publications, media sources, and scholarly articles. Include Statista's "Global Consumer Survey", which helps marketers understand consumer behavior and brand interaction.
Statistical Insight This link opens in a new window
Statistical Insight provides indexing and abstracts for federal, state, and international statistical publications as well as selected business and professional publications containing statistics. Approximately 20% of the federal statistical publications are available in full text. This resource includes all content from the American Statistics Index (ASI), Statistical Reference Index (SRI), and Index to International Statistics (IIS), including Statistical Datasets. Dates of coverage: 1973 to present.

Social Security Research - U.S.

Research, Statistics, & Policy Analysis
The research and policy analysis information section of the U.S. Social Security website is the result of a collaborative effort among three ORDP offices—the Office of Research, Demonstration, and Employment Support, the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics, and the Office of Retirement Policy. All three offices work together to conduct research and policy analysis and disseminate the results of their research in a variety of publications that are available on this website.

Social Security Research - International

Social Security Programs Throughout the World
U.S. government publication produced by the Social Security Administration which highlights the principal features of social security programs in more than 170 countries. Published in collaboration with the International Social Security Association (ISSA), one of four regional volumes is issued every six months.

International Statistical Sources

OECD This link opens in a new window
OECD (formerly OECD iLibrary) is the online portal for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OCED content includes book collections, policy reports, statistical abstracts, and the OECD.Stat tool, with which users can create custom extracts from the OECD data warehouse.
UNdata This link opens in a new window
UNdata is the data download portal of the United Nations. Users can search by country, year, and indicator and create custom data extracts to download. UNData also includes an API that developers can use to query, display results externally, and download to local storage for further analysis. The data portal includes datasets from the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), World Health Organization (WHO), and more.