ICPSR is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, a membership-based organization which acquires data from individual researchers, polling agencies, governmental and international agencies. ICPSR maximizes the availability and utilization of data by obtaining the data and technical documentation, adding SPSS and/or SAS control, etc., and then making these resources available for its members. In addition, ICPSR conducts a summer training program in quantitative methods of social research through courses in research design, statistics, data analysis, and social methodology.
UAB is an institutional member of ICPSR, meaning all UAB affiliates students, staff and faculty can access and use research data deposited there at no cost to them. Note that some studies are publicly available to all (such as OpenICPSR).
This guide will help you both find data in ICPSR relevant to your area of study, and review the process to deposit your research data into ICPSR.
If you are not familiar with ICPSR, this video provides a brief overview:
ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 350,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 23 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. Here is an example of a recent dataset added to the ICPSR archive:
Applying Artificial Intelligence to Person-Based Policing Practices, 2019-2023
The design of this page was partly adapted from Research: By Course, Subject, or Topic, by University of Arizona Libraries, © 2020 The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
