Quantitative data archives and repositories
Last month I blogged about Repositories for teaching and learning qualitative analysis. Following this I had numerous requests for an additional post on quantitative data repositories.
As mentioned previously, repositories and archives of datasets are increasingly becoming a mandatory part of research. Bringing with them opportunities for data sharing and secondary analysis alongside demands of ethical care of datasets and issues of confidentiality, anonymity and reinterpretation of findings.
The following resources are by no means exhaustive so if there are archives and repositories you have used to store or share your own work or undertake secondary analysis of other people’s data then please add them in the comments. Particularly if you are working in low income countries or countries not usually covered in data sharing projects.
You might use these in teaching, to practice data analysis, to inform work you are already undertaking, to set baselines for your studies or cross country comparisons, or as a means of re-interrogating existing datasets with new lenses or hypotheses.
The Medical Research Council have created their Cohort Study directory
Links to directories and websites for datasets can be found at:
Quantitative Methods Initiative
Social Science Data Archives (global list)
University of California’s Department of Sociology list of data repositories
University of Wyoming’s open access and data archival services
ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)
University of Southampton’s sources of secondary data
Georgia State University Library identifying repositories for data sharing
SAGE Research Methods have loads of quantitative and qualitative datasets for use in teaching and practising analysis.
Specific repositories you might want to search through:
iDASH (integrating Data for Analysis, Anonymization and Sharing)
UK Data Archive
Hscic (Health and Social Care Information Centre) Secondary Uses Service
US Aid’s Development Data Library (DDL)
Dryad allows you to deposit your own data or search other people’s, while World Bank Data Viz is a place to share your development visuals.
UK Data Service list of question banks.
Administration Data Research Network
GapMinder
GitHub’s tips on data sharing
Understanding Society
World Bank Data
British Library’s Guide on Quantitative Methods in Social Research lists what tools and materials they have available to help interrogate quantitative data
There are additional tools and resources for data storage, analysis and sharing in the Resources part of this site. In particular you may want to look at the sections on Data and Trials.
UK Data Service guide to Citing Data is practical and easy to follow.
You may also want to read these guides on ethics and data sharing and storage
Data storage and data security
Ethics, consent and data sharing
Managing and sharing data – best practice for researchers
The image at the start of this post is an artistic interpretation of unusual numbers, showing a circle made up of smaller coloured circles. Found on this piece on Visualising irrationally beautiful numbers