Data Archives

The Center's Social Sciences Data Archives maintains a variety of data sets to meet research and teaching needs.  The data holdings, either generated from surveys or obtained from published sources such as the Census, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and so on, cover social, economic, demographic, financial, health, public opinion, political, and other types of data at regional, national and international levels.

In addition, the Archives provides assistance to FSU faculty and students in locating and ordering data from other locations, such as ICPSR, which stores and distributes data from both individual researchers and many federally funded social science studies.

The data sets, along with codebooks and/or computer programs, can be provided in a form of the client's choice.  Large data files can be supplied on CD-ROM.  Many data files and their associated documentation are now downloadable directly from the Center's Web Site.  The Archives helps the client to generate data files using scanning and copying equipment, and convert data files between various spreadsheet, database and statistical package formats.

The Archives is planning to set up a web-based computer-searchable catalog for the data sets it holds.  The catalog contains abstracts for each holding or series within the collection.  Searchable fields include title, author, producer, study number, methodology, description of content, and geographic areas. The data archive home page will add more links to other sources of social science dataset and to other sources of data about Florida.

The College of Social Sciences Computer Lab, located on the ground level of Bellamy Building, provides computing resources to social science students.  Currently the Lab has around 30 Pentium-processor equipped workstations, which are all wired to the Internet, email, printing resources, and the campus research mainframe.  In addition, current software for word processing, spreadsheet, database, and statistical analysis are maintained at each workstation.  The computer lab is open 60 hours per week, and is staffed at all times by lab assistants equipped to answer basic questions about data management, statistical analysis, interpretation of output, and statistical programming packages and make referrals to other staff when additional expertise is required.

Contact Paul Hanna (850) 644-6929 or Yuhang Shi (850) 644-7394 for more information.