Center for Social and Policy Studies (CSPS)

The Center for Social and Policy Studies, located in rooms 104 and 105 of Trotter Hall, serves as a laboratory for the social sciences. The Center has a social science data archive available for empirical research on social and policy issues, and, through its Director, provides statistical consulting for faculty and students. The Resource Room, Trotter 104, houses a computer equipped with statistical analysis software.

The Center also supports the concentration in Public Policy through its physical facilities, data archives and program of events.

• Meet the Director, Prof. Gudmund Iversen

The Center for Social and Policy Studies is an organizational member of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research located at The University of Michigan. The ICPSR is an organization of member institutions working together to acquire and preserve social science data, to provide open and equitable access to these data, and to promote effective data use. ICPSR promotes and facilitates research and instruction in the social sciences and related areas by acquiring, developing, archiving, and disseminating data and documentation for instruction and research and by conducting related instructional programs.

Click here to connect to the ICPSR Homepage

Also, the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research annually offers its Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques, a program of courses in survey design, quantitative and qualitative data collection methods, and statistical analysis of data. The most recent brochure contents are available at http://www.isr.umich.edu. Brochures, posters and enrollment information are mailed to CSPS early in the spring semester. This website is also a good source of data.

Some good dataset websites:

• A good listing of data links is available through the Swarthmore College Economics Department webpage http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/Economics/data.html
• United Nations Statistics Division http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/
• FDIC website http://www.fdic.gov/
• an interactive mapper of census data http://sedac.ciesin.org/plue/ddviewer
• experimental data cross tabulation engine of PUMS data via web http://plue.sedac.ciesin.org/plue/ulysses
• a geographic correspondence engine (includes ZIPS and PUMA geography) http://oseda.missouri.edu/plue/geocorr
• basic demographic tables and trend reports (80&90) http://oseda.missouri.edu/uic
• Kansas data & experimental java mapper of census data http://kuhttp.cc.ukans.edu/cwis/units/IPPBR/ksdata.html
• MapQuest, type in your address, get a location http://www.mapquest.com/
• search for a place in the U.S. and obtain census data http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/gazetteer
• U.S. counties, places and zipcodes http://www.census.gov/ftp/pub/tiger/tms/gazetteer/
• Jim Jacobs, Data Services Librarian at the University of California, San Diego, has been keeping lists of National Archives and Records Administration links at http://odwin/ucsd/edu/jj/idata/
• IMF data, valuable to researchers working on international finance and trade http://dsbb.imf.org
• the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/SAMHDA

POPULATION ORGANIZATIONS: FINDER'S GUIDE (November 1996) is a practical tool for population professionals to use to locate organizations that publish, distribute or post population or family planning documents. Entries include acronyms, the address, and telephone, telex, cable, FAX, institutional Email addresses and any Internet site offering publications information or the publications themselves.

The Finder's Guide is revised frequently. It may be searched at: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/