The ICPSR website is a great place to source a variety of information, reports, and tools for finding data to use for evaluation.
ICPSR is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. It’s a global leader in data stewardship, providing a wealth of data resources and responsive educational opportunities. They store, curate, and provide access to scientific data so that others can use it.
Here are some ways evaluators can use the ICPSR website:
• ICPSR allows you to search for data from evaluations. It also provides a number of curation tools and services, from free Excel tools to programs for prepping data and metadata, and more. ICPSR also curates an announcement section featuring news about data, measurement, and research.
• The website features a Social Science Variables Database (SSVD) that allows users to examine and compare variables/questions across studies or series. The SSVD can essentially be used as a keyword search through the studies on the ICPSR database.
• ICPSR also continuously updates its holdings, including journal articles, books, government and agency reports, magazine and newspaper articles, unpublished manuscripts, and more. Items are searchable through citation, author, journal, or study, which makes it easy to search for specific data-related literature.
