ICPSR Minority Data Resource Center

The library has a subscription to The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). ICPSR has just launched a new database -- the Minority Data Resource Center (MDRC).

The mission of MDRC is to provide data resources for the comparative analysis of issues affecting racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States. It offers streamlined access to existing ICPSR data and to newly acquired studies that are relevant to the study of immigration, place of origin, ancestry, ethnicity, and race in the United States. Many of the studies that comprise the collection have the full product suite of setup and ready-to-files for SAS, SPSS, and Stata, as well as PDF documentation and online analysis capabilities.

MDRC is both a data archive, and a resource for instructors. MDRC data collections with SDA online analysis are equipped with three additional analysis tools:

• Sample Characteristics. This tool allows interested users to assess whether the sample population of a study has the desired demographic characteristics.
• Recode Syntax. This tool allows users to not only recode a variable, an option already available through online analysis, but also print out the syntax necessary for that recode so that syntax may be incorporated into users' own statistical syntax files.
• Subset. This tool allows users to create data subsets dynamically for selected subpopulations of the survey.
  
  

Feel free to try out these new tools in a sample MDRC study:
ICPSR Study 4404: Capital Punishment in the United States, 1973-2003

Questions about ICPSR? Contact Ken Simon, Reference Technology Coordinator, at x87686.