STATISTICS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Snaring Statistics from the Web:
A Social Scientists' Introduction
to Surfing the Web

by Frank LoPresti and John Krigbaum

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

Welcome to NYU and to the ACF's Social Sciences support services {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/socsci/} Replacement URL: http://www.nyu.edu/its/socsci/. The ACF has a wide variety of resources that can help you with all of your computing needs, and I've mailed you a brochure outlining them. But, regarding the research you've been doing at the London School of Economics, our Social Sciences Group can assist you in transferring all of the data you've been using to New York. We can also help you implement your statistical designs, and if you need additional data, we can get that for you from a number of sources.

A good place to learn about our group is through our new World-Wide Web (WWW) pages. You sent me e-mail from a networked NYU computer, so you clearly have all the resources required to "surf" the Web. I'll show you how to access our new Social Science page on the NYU Web and find links to data relevant to your research in British parliamentary history, and a whole lot more.

You can get to the page through menu options from the NYU home page and the ACF page {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/} Replacement URL: http://www.nyu.edu/its/; you can read a lot more about them in the current issue of Connect. Our own home page features a bookcase that reflects the way we group our services: Data Distribution and Management, Survey Research and Design, Geographic Information Systems, and Statistics. Within these groups you'll find a good bit of important information that can enhance your research here at NYU.

Let me take you on a tour from the ACF home page with your specialty in mind. Each Web page, as you probably know, has certain hotspots - places that have links to another page. These hotspots are usually highlighted text or buttons, but can be parts of a larger image. When the cursor is dragged across a hotspot, it becomes a hand, indicating that you can click on that spot to go to the next level. Select the Social Sciences button. Voilà! Our page appears and you will see an elegant set of bookcases with labels across the top and down the sides.

To look for data about your area, try clicking on the shelf at the intersection of the column labeled Survey R&D and the row labeled Data. A new screen appears - The Survey R&D Data Page. There you'll find a button labeled Comments and Orders. You'll use this later. There are other buttons too, such as the ICPSR button, which takes you to the source of thousands of data sets archived at the University of Michigan (see "Some Useful Web Sites for Social Scientists" for more details). Once you're connected there, you can click on a button for ICPSR Resources and Services.

At the next level, in the paragraph headed Access to ICPSR's Data Resources, you'll find the terms FTP, CD-ROM, and diskette highlighted - three easy ways you can access the data. Data sets listed under FTP are immediately sent to NYU from ICPSR via File Transfer Protocol, at no cost to you - one of the many services that our membership in the consortium provides. If you choose data sets that aren't available via FTP, ICPSR will send the data to you overland.

To search the text describing the data sets, you can use the Find function that's part of Netscape, the browser. Click on the Find button on the menu bar and a window opens to accept a search string. Type in British, for example, and it will search for all occurrences of the word in the titles on the list of available data sets. This should help you get started. I'll send you e-mail in the near future discussing suggested links or bookmarks on our Web page that may be of further interest to you and your research. All the best.

Posted 17 October 1995. Revised 30 January 2004.