ICPSR

ICPSR, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, was established in 1962. An integral part of the infrastructure of social science research, ICPSR maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction (over 8,000 discrete studies/surveys with more than 65,000 datasets). Since 1963, ICPSR has offered training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. The ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research offers a comprehensive curriculum in research design, statistics, data analysis, and methodology. To ensure that data resources are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR curates and preserves data, migrating them to new storage media and file formats as changes in technology warrant. In addition, ICPSR provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis and in conducting their research projects.

ICPSR supports students, instructors, researchers, and policy makers who:

ICPSR provides a number of tools as classroom aids for college-level instructors:

A unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, ICPSR is a membership-based organization, with approximately 760 member colleges and universities and other research institutions around the world. A Governing Council of leading scholars and data professionals guides and oversees the activities of ICPSR.

While many of the datasets housed at ICPSR are provided to the public without cost, most require the user to be a member of an ICPSR member institution or to pay a download fee.

The ICPSR data archive is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.

From the beginning, the founders of ICPSR believed a training component was a necessary part of the organization in order to teach researchers how to use the newly available data the consortium was providing.

The first Summer Program was held in 1963 and was attended by 21 faculty members and 41 graduate students from member institutions. The program offered nine courses, with the most popular class, "Proseminar in Behavior Research Methods," attracting 46 participants.

Throughout the decades, the Summer Program expanded in many ways that mirrored the growth of ICPSR as a whole — participation grew and the offerings became more diverse.

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