When hunting for statistical information, here are some guidelines:
Start with a published compendium. These will provide tables of basic information and their text will provide context, definitions, and background. A good compendium should point to its sources where you can find more detailed information. Government agencies are often the best sources of information.
Then look for published statistics tables if you can't find information in a compendium or if it doesn't point you to a more detailed source. These usually appear on a government agency's website, under "Data" or "Statistics" headings. The most current numbers often appear in a government agency's press releases, "fast stats", or briefs. Note : Stand-alone tables often provide numbers with no explanation or context.
Then turn to interactive databases if you find that published statistical tables do not give you the detailed information you need. These will require you to make selections among variables. Always look for documentation or "Help" pages to understand definitions and data limitations.
And last, turn to microdata if you cannot find the detail you need. These are very large datasets containing individual responses (survey questionnaires, administrative filings). Using these may require statistical software, or they may permit you to build frequency tables and crosstabulations by selecting variables, but they will always require your decisions in constructing output, sometimes including how to weight variables for sample error or for projecting for whole populations.
Trying to locate government-produced health websites and health-related datasets that have been suppressed through government action can be frustrating. You know the web page or dataset existed, but you cannot find it. After you have found bad links elsewhere on this library guide, here are some suggestions for finding these older web pages and the datasets and grey literature that are linked from them.
When a government administration changes - through elections, coup, or other disaster - government websites can change too. Web pages may vanish, sometimes replaced by new web pages. Web page URLs may stay the same, but the page content may be very different before and after an administration's turnover. Documents, spreadsheets, and other files linked from old web pages may be lost from the government record.
These website generally archive static datasets that might require statistical software for analysis.
Demographics (sex, age, race), social and economic characteristics (including poverty, income, and education), and detailed housing characteristics for the United States and smaller US geographies from the Decennial Census, American Community Survey, and other data sources.
These advanced tools provide interfaces to extract groups of records from large datasets or to construct frequency tables or crosstabulations from selected variables.
