2005-2007 ACS Data Release

From the NC State Data Center:

The US Census Bureau will release the first 3 year data from the American Community Survey on December 9, 2008. This will be the first release of ACS data for areas with a population of 20,000 – 64,999 and will also include 3 year data for areas with populations over 65,000. 3 year data will be released annually from now on. The 3 year data will have smaller margins of error as well as presenting data for more geographic areas.

The Census Bureau is also developing handbooks to help users make sense of the ACS and use it correctly. The handbooks are focused on 12 user categories or product types. At this time only the following handbooks are available:

General Data Users
Business Data Users
Media
Congress

For more information on the American Community Survey or to view the ACS Handbooks, visit http://www.census.gov/acs/www/

Center for Economic Studies Dissertation Mentorship Program

The Center for Economic Studies wants to assist doctoral candidates who are actively engaged in dissertation research in economics or related fields using Census Bureau microdata at one of the Census Bureau’s Research Data Centers. Program participants will be assigned one or more CES staff economists as mentors, who will advise students on issues related to the use of Census microdata. Program participants will also be invited to visit the Center for Economic Studies at U.S. Census Bureau headquarters in Washington DC, to meet with staff economists and to present research in progress. Trip expenses (airfare, hotel, and meals) will be paid for by CES.

Eligibility: Must be actively working on a Ph.D. thesis in economics or related fields using Census Bureau microdata at an RDC. U.S. citizenship is required.

To Apply: Submit title and abstract of dissertation (including a description of data being used), name of faculty advisor, and your contact information to Randy Becker (randy.a.becker@census.gov).

Deadline: Acceptance will be on a rolling basis, as funding allows.

ICPSR website outage on December 3

The ICPSR website will be unvailable on Dec. 3.

They are planning on upgrading core database software/hardware on Wednesday, December 3, starting at 1pm EST. They expect the transition to take several hours, during which time none of the ICPSR-hosted Web sites will be completely functional.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email web-support@icpsr.umich.edu.

2009 Undergraduate Opportunities in the Social Sciences

ICPSR Undergraduate Research Paper Competition

ICPSR sponsors two undergraduate research paper competitions. The first competition, sponsored by the general archive at ICPSR, requires a research paper supported by quantitative analysis of any dataset(s) held within the ICPSR archive or any of its special topic archives. The second competition is sponsored by the Minority Data Resource Center (MDRC). The paper must address issues relevant to underrepresented minorities in the United States including immigrants, and data must be drawn from the MDRC. A separate committee will be formed to judge this competition. The purpose of these competitions is to highlight the best undergraduate student research papers using quantitative data. The objective is to encourage undergraduates to explore the social sciences by means of critical analysis of a topic supported by quantitative analysis of a dataset(s) held within the ICPSR archive and presented in written form.Up to three cash prizes will be awarded for each competition, and the deadline for submission is May 31, 2009.

ICPSR Undergraduate Internship

The ICPSR Internship is a 10-week program designed to familiarize students with social science research, data preparation, and analysis. Interns work in the UNIX and Windows environments and gain experience using statistical programs such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata to check data. Data processing skills will be applied to prepare social science data for permanent archiving and distribution for secondary analysis; preserving respondent anonymity; and composing descriptions of data collections. These positions are supervised by an experienced Research Associate.

Interns attend courses in the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. Interns will be required to attend a weekly Lunch and Lecture series that will expose them to various aspects and departments of ICPSR and Institute for Social Research (ISR). There may be additional social and work-related functions involving other ICPSR staff and interns from other ISR units and summer programs.

This is a paid internship and the application deadline is February 2, 2009.

New entrepreneurship report from OECD

Measuring entrepreneurship: a digest of indicators is a new report from the Statistics Directorate at the OECD. The report presents the results of the first round of data collected under the the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP). The Statistics Directorate also produces SourceOECD, a database we have available at UNCG.

ICPSR Online Learning Center - Opening Doors to Quantitative Literacy!

ICPSR is pleased to announce the official launch of the Online Learning Center (OLC). The site can also be found under the Courses & Learning Tools tab on the ICPSR front page.

ICPSR's Online Learning Center (OLC) supports quantitative literacy in the social sciences by providing an effective and reliable means of bringing data into the classroom. OLC tools were designed, built, and tested by teaching faculty.

Currently numbering 30 (with more added continually), our Data-Driven Learning Guides are designed for in-class presentation or as supplemental activities for students demonstrating a variety of types of data analysis and substantive concepts. Available on-demand 24/7, DDLGs:

• Demonstrate core concepts using prepared data with missing data and weights accommodated.


• Avoid the hassles of software licensing, setup, and instruction.


• Are easily customized to your teaching approach and syllabus.


• Are appropriate as supplemental exercises or for in-class demonstrations.

We look forward to your feedback and suggestions via email, the OLC Blog, or the OLC listserv all available through the OLC Web site.

SES Graduate Student Presentation, 10/13/2008

American Community Survey data

The 2007 social, demographic, and housing data from the American Community Survey (ACS) have been released. This is single year data for those areas of North Carolina with populations of 65,000 or more. 2007 ACS economic data was released in August to coincide with the poverty and health insurance data release from the Current Population Survey. You can access all of the 2007 ACS data through American Factfinder. ACS will release the first of its 3-year aggregate data for areas with populations of 20,000 or more in December.

Census Research Data Center Annual Conference, Oct. 13, 2008

The 2008 Research Data Center Conference will be held October 13, 2008 at Duke University and is hosted by the Triangle Research Data Center. Registration is free to the UNCG community (with lunch included), but registration is required to attend. Register at http://www.econ.duke.edu/tcrdc/rsvp/view-events.php See the full list of conference presentations (PDF).

Specialized Education Services Presentation

Community Economic Development HotReport

The Community Economic Development (CED) HotReport is the groundbreaking work of the Census Bureau’s Data Integration Division. HotReports analyze data from myriad data sets in- and outside of the Census Bureau and display it visually on interactive web pages. You can look at Guilford County's economic indicators, demographic changes, housing information and more as graphs, charts, and maps.  You can also examine regions, such as the Piedmont Triad. It looks like the feds are finally getting Web 2.0! And, oh yes, it is HOT!

Anyone want to know about Guns and Colonists from 1773 through 1775?

Check out ICPSR's newest data releases. They've just added data on weapons owned by our nation's colonists!

Be the first to know!

Newest members of the Dataland family!

We have just added two new data sources to our list: Geolytics: CensusCD 1980 in 2000 Boundaries and Geolytics: 2008 Estimates and 2013 Projections. Geolytics: 2008 Estimates and 2013 Projections allows users to access US Census data from 1980 and compare it with the 2000 Census data. Geolytics: 2008 Estimates and 2013 Projections provides access to demographic variables for the current U.S. population and for 5-year projections of population trends. These products allow you to create data reports or maps as well as extract the data as a DBF or CSV file. More information on these sources will be coming soon!

American Community Survey data releases

From the NC Data Center: The American Community Survey (ACS) released the first of its 2007 single year data for areas with a population over 65,000 on Tuesday. This was the economic release including poverty data to coincide with the poverty and health insurance coverage release from the Current Population Survey. The rest of the 2007 single year ACS data will be released in September. The first release of 3-year-aggregate ACS data for areas with a population of 20,000 or more will happen in early December! This will provide data for more areas of our state, and that data will now be available annually.

Check out ICPSR's newest releases!

Looking for hot new data? Check out ICPSR's newest collections and updates.

Be the first to know!!

Statistics and Art!

Statistics and art do mix! Check out Joshua Callaghan's exhibit "Very Concerned, Somewhat Concerned, Not At All Concerned".

Thanks to the data librarian at the University of Southern California, Katharin Peter, for the heads up!

2010 Census is coming soon!

The Census Bureau is gearing up for the 2010 Census. Want to know more about the kick-off efforts?! You know you do. Check out the kick-off presentation on the NC State Data Center website.

National Survey of Adolescents Data Series Publicly Available Through DSDR (ICPSR)

The Data Sharing for Demographic Research archive at the Inter-univeristy consortium for political and social research (ICPSR) now has data available from the 2004 National Survey of Adolescents. The National Survey of Adolescents was launched in 2004 in four Sub-Saharan African countries to provide detailed information on adolescent risk-taking and health-seeking behavior as related to HIV, STDs, and unintended pregnancy. The study examined a range of factors (e.g., behavioral, sociocultural, economic) that could lead to increased risk-taking behaviors. The study also sought to determine knowledge of means of prevention, sources of trusted information and health care, and impediments to adolescents' abilities to apply their knowledge and take preventive action.

DSDR has data from both the household- and individual-level surveys for the following research projects: Burkina Faso (ICPSR 22408), Ghana (ICPSR 22409), Malawi (ICPSR 22410), and Uganda (ICPSR 22411). Data are available in SAS transport, SPSS system, and Stata DTA formats, in addition to ASCII and ASCII tab-delimited data files with SAS, SPSS, and Stata setup files. All four studies in the National Survey of Adolescents series are also available for online data analysis (SDA).

If you have any questions about the National Survey of Adolescents series data, please contact Russel S. Hathaway, Ph.D. at rhataway@umich.edu or at 734.615.9525.

New export functionality deployed in the ICPSR Bibliography

Users of the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature can now export individual citations directly into reference management software like EndNote or online tools like Zotero (a free extension to the Internet browser, Firefox).

Next to each ICPSR citation, an "Export citation" link now appears. Clicking the link automatically exports the citation. Future enhancements to the Bibliography will include the ability to mark and export multiple search results at once, in more formats.

The ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature is a searchable database that contains over 45,000 citations of known published and unpublished works resulting from analyses of data held in the ICPSR archive.

Check out ICPSR's newest releases!

Looking for hot new data? Check out ICPSR's newest collections and updates.

Be the first to know!!

A World of Data

Would you like to see polling data on the mood of the country as we move into the election? Do you need to know about differences in political attitudes based on age, race, or ethnicity? UNCG’s University Libraries has membership in two data archives that can assist you with these questions and more—the ICPSR and the Roper Center.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is the world’s largest archive of social science data. Through UNCG’s membership, faculty, staff, and students have access to over 6,300 studies from every discipline of the social sciences.

Also, faculty, staff, and students now have access to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. The Roper Center is an archive of 500,000 questions from national opinion survey organizations and news sources, such as Gallup and the Wall Street Journal.

If you would like to learn more about our membership, please contact Lynda Kellam, Data Services and Government Information Librarian, through the Data and Numeric Services Website.

Welcome to UNCG's Dataland

UNCG's University Libraries newest service is all about data, statistics, and finding you the information you need. Our blog will bring you information on data releases, new sources and services, and much more! See our website for contacts and tons of great links!.