The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is the largest archive of social science data sets, including almost all major studies, including the General Social Survey and International Social Survey Program, American National Election Study, Eurobarometer, Voter News Service exit polls, National Crime Victimization Survey, and public opinion polls. Access is free for members of the Penn community, but requires a free MyData account. Most data sets have setup files for importing into statistical packages SPSS, SAS, or Stata.
USE OF ICPSR DATA REQUIRES STATISTICAL PROCESSING SOFTWARE AND GZIP DECOMPRESSION SOFTWARE. Direct-download access to social science quantitative data sets archived by ICPSR. Subjects covered include political science, sociology, demography, history, economics, communication, international relations, gerontology, public health, criminal justice, and education. The ICPSR archive includes almost all major studies in the social sciences, including the General Social Survey and International Social Survey Program, decennial Census of Population and Housing, American National Election Study, Eurobarometer, Voter News Service exit polls, US Congressional and UN roll call votes, National Crime Victimization Survey, and public opinion polls. Special topic archives, with limited interactive tabulation and extraction capability, cover health and medical care, international education, aging, criminal justice, and substance abuse and mental health.
This archive of public opinion data holds polls conducted not just by Roper, but also by Gallup, Pew Center, New York Times, USA Today, and many other survey organizations and sponsors, from 1936 to the present. It has two access points: RoperExpress, a catalog of datasets, and iPOLL, a question-level search engine. RoperExpress datasets are downloadable in SPSS portable or ASCII formats.
Holdings in economic, electoral, demographic, financial, health, and public opinion data. Repository for the Harris Polls. Also maintains the Public Opinion Poll Question Database, providing question-level access to Odum Institute-archived polls.
Specialty Archives
These archives collect data related to a particular topic.
Microdata archive with a focus on health and social work, including research into AIDS/STD, disability in the U.S., the American family, adolescent pregnancy and pregnancy prevention, aging, and maternal drug abuse, and aggregate population, social, economic data supporting geographic contextual analysis, from late 1970s to early 2000s.
Often, national governments are the only organizations large enough to conduct major survey operations. Locating the relevant government agency can lead to free, publicly available data sets.
Gateway to U.S. statistical agencies, with useful listing by topics. Provides press releases announcing recent data and indicator releases, OMB statistical policy documents. A great place to discover which agency covers what topic.