ICPSR & iPoll

OU has access to two data sources: ICPSR and iPoll.

ICPSR

ICPSR stands for Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. It is the world's largest collection of digital social science data. These data can be used for secondary research, instructional activities, and to write articles, papers or theses.

Data cover topics including sociology, political science, economics, demography, education, child care, health care, crime, minority populations, aging, terrorism, substance abuse, mental health, public policy, and international relations.

Students, faculty, and staff have direct access to ICPSR data holdings from any campus computer and may download data from ICPSR's Web. First-time users will be asked to create an ICPSR MyData account from a computer on-campus. You will need your email address and password to download data. Log into your account from an on-campus computer at the beginning of the term, then you are able to access your account from off-campus for the next six months.

iPoll and the Roper Center public opinion data

The Roper Center public opinion data is now available to the Oakland University community thanks to the Political Science Department. The Roper Center is the largest archives of public opinion information. You now have on-demand access to the full datasets required to conduct bivariate and multivariate analyses on archived surveys using RoperExpress. The catalog of data set holdings permits searching by keyword, date, country, and survey organization.

This membership also offers access to iPOLL, a comprehensive database of 500,000 questions and answers asked in the US since 1935.

These combined services permit you to locate datasets rich in data of interest to you and then using point and click technology, download the documentation and data files for the studies within minutes.  For US data, iPOLL permits you to locate questions (and the answers of the full sample) and then to link to the data files and run secondary analysis.