STATISTICS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Some Useful Web Sites for Social Scientists
By Frank LoPresti
[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.]
These Web sites can be reached through links on the ACF Social Sciences home page {http://www.nyu.edu/acf/socsci.html"} Replacement URL: http://www.nyu.edu/its/socsci/.
ICPSR
ICPSR {gopher://icpsr.umich.edu/11/Archival_Holdings/USCensus"} Replacement URL: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ (the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), of which NYU is a member, serves member colleges and universities in the United States and abroad and its archives are based at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Our annual dues cover most services to NYU researchers. ICPSR provides:
You can browse their home page to find out what is new. For example, they just released the American National Election Studies 1948-1994 CD (ICPSR Study 8475) and the 1992 Pre- and Post-Election Survey (ICPSR 6067), described in detail on their home page.
A search of the data holdings is provided on the Web page. Newly released and updated data collections as well as the ICPSR training programs are announced in the quarterly ICPSR Bulletin (JSE). These bulletins are available in the Web page.
Journal of Statistics Education
The Journal of Statistics Education is a refereed electronic journal on postsecondary teaching of statistics. The journal is supported by the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University and by a grant from FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education), U.S. Department of Education.
The JSE page includes entire articles from the journal. Many of the articles are elementary enough to be and are useful for teaching first courses in statistics. The data sets used in the articles are also available from the Web page. Electronic subscriptions to jse-talk and announcements of new issues are available via e-mail free of charge. It also links users to the Web pages for two major statistical programs, SAS and SPSS.
StatLib
StatLib {http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/www/otherplaces/} Replacement URL: http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/ is a great resource for those
interested in links to statistics pages at many other universities.
{It's moderated by Mike Meyer (mikem@stat.cmu.edu), a senior research scientist in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.}
[Ed: See the StatLib site for current moderator information].
The self-proclaimed "Factfinder for the Nation," the Census Bureau has created a server that is a model server for government agencies to follow. In short, it organizes information so that citizens can make their own use of it. You can get financial data on state and local governments, as well as schools. The Bureau's statistical briefs are printable PostScript documents that cover a whole range of information from poverty in the U.S., statistics on housing changes from 1981 to 1991, or statistics on people of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage in the American population. In the Census Bureau Art Gallery they even display posters used to promote participation in the decennial census.
Although the actual raw Census data are not available due to privacy laws, the Data Extraction System (also known as SIPP-On-Call) summarizes recent Census data based on criteria you supply. You can perform a search based on a huge number of variables and receive the results in by Telnet, by e-mail, or by a temporary file stored at the Census FTP site. ![[ C ]](../icons/CSmF95.gif)
Frank Lopresti heads the ACF's Social Sciences Group.
lopresti@nyu.edu
Posted 17 October 1995. Revised 30 January 2004.
