What is ICPSR? | Who Can Access the Data? | Searching for Data | Downloading Data | Getting Help

What is ICPSR?
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is the world's largest archive of computer readable social science data. ICPSR provides Web access to data files and documentation for use with statistical software, such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata.

The ICPSR data holdings contain some 6,300 studies and 500,000 files that cover a wide range of social science areas such as population, economics, education, health, social and political behavior, social and political attitudes, history, crime, aging, and substance abuse.

Who Can Access the Data?
UNC-Chapel Hill is an ICPSR member institution. Students, faculty and staff have direct access to most data available at ICPSR. Users must create a My Data account and agree to abide by the terms of a responsible use statement. Some data sets in the topical archives are federally funded and available to anyone. Documentation for all studies is feely available to all.

Searching for Data
Search for data using ICPSR's catalog or advanced search interface. You can also browse data by subject, browse the Special Topics Archives, and search Data-Related Literature. Improve search results by using the ICPSR Thesaurus.

Downloading Data
UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty and staff may download data directly from ICPSR while on-campus. First time users must create a My Data account to access data. The majority of data files come with SAS, SPSS and Stata setup files which enable you to read data into these statistical software packages.

In a step by step process, users chose the data format they want, select from available files, and add data to a cart for download. All files are downloaded as zipped files and must be uncompressed on your machine. Additionally setup files must be edited to point to the full path name of the downloaded file.

See ICPSR's Data Use Tutorial for step by step instructions.

Get Help
ICPSR's Data Use Tutorial offers a quick overview of searching and accessing ICPSR data.

Additional Help Documentation is available as a FAQ database.

Contact Pam Sessoms for help with locating or downloading ICPSR data.

The ICPSR Official Representative at UNC-Chapel Hill is David Sheaves.