Undergraduate Summer Research Programs - SPUR, SUMR, & SIRE: Finding Quantitative Data

• Who
  If you could imagine the smallest unit you'd like to analyze, would it be individual people, households, firms, or something else? What is it that you hope to draw conclusions about?
• What
  What should the data tell you about these people or other units? How would you measure that, and what kind of categories would you create. These are the variables you need.
• When
  Do you need data from a particular historical period? Do you need a snapshot (i.e. cross-sectional data) or changes over time (i.e. a time series)? Is the series yearly, weekly, once a decade?
• Where
  Do you need to know about a particular place--a city, county, state, or country? Within that place, are there smaller areas you would like to compare, e.g. neighborhoods within a city?
• Why
  Why would someone record data on this subject? If you know who would be interested, then you can infer where you might find it. For example, the Centers for Disease Control is interested in the spread of diseases, so they might be a source for health data.

Use a research guide from Penn Libraries or Lippincott Library that covers your topic:

• U.S. Census Data
• International Statistics
• Election Data
• All guides focused on data

Identify an organization that studies your topic. This will often be a government agency, which may have data available for download on their website.

• See FedStats for a list of U.S. government agencies that collect data.
• See Northwestern Library's list of IGOs to find international organizations.

Search a data archive. Archives preserve data for research and reuse. Some are subscription resources, but some are freely available.

• ICPSR
• Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
• Other data archives

Find scholarly articles and identify the author or authors' data sources.

• Databases by subject.

Find relevant statistics and find the data from which they were drawn.

• Try searching ProQuest Statistical Insight.
• In Franklin, try searching for "your subject" AND statistics by Subject.