Public Policy and Administration
Data and Statistics
- Data (raw numbers) provides all available variables collected; it can be manipulated and aggregated as needed.
- Data Sets are data collected and arranged logically according to definite criteria. They can also be manipulated.
- Statistics are data that has already been prepared/presented in aggregate form such as a table, chart or graph. They cannot be manipulated.
REQUESTING DATA
All too often the only way to access that tantalizing data set you just read about is to track down the researcher and request that they share. Here are some tips for how to do so:
Downloadable Data Sets
To find datasets from federal agencies you may want to start at Data.gov, the home of the U.S. government's open data, or go directly to a federal agency's data page. To search for a data set within a federal agency put the name of the federal agency in quotation marks, then the word data in your search string. EX: "Bureau of Land Management" data
For DEMOGRAPHIC data go to US Census
For OPINION data:
PRRI: Public Religion Research Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.
OTHER data:
ICPSR: ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) collects, stores, and provides access to data sets as well as resources for using them. Log in with your Boise State ID and password (upper left of ICPSR home page) for full access
Statistics
- Fiscal 50Pew Charitable Trust's Fiscal 50, state trends and analysis
- GallupGallup conducts surveys to monitor behavior, opinions, and economic indicators worldwide. They publish some information for free online, but not in sets.
- PolicyMapPublic edition of online mapping with data on demographics, real estate, health, jobs and more
Text Analysis
These free tools can help you track word use over time, and, in some cases, over various resources. Many other text mining and analysis tools are available for a fee.
Applied Program Interfaces for the New York Times - register to use the Semantic API
Google Books Ngram Viewer - tracks how phrases have been used in a corpus of Google Books
Google Trends - tracks trending search phrases
Media Cloud - an open source for media analysis