ICPSR Services for Researchers and Students

ICPSR (Opens in a new tab) (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) is the world’s largest data archive for the social sciences. The archive, functioning in connection with the University of Michigan in the United States, holds research data from the social and behavioural sciences from all around the world. FSD is a member of ICPSR (Opens in a new tab) , and data and services at ICPSR are available to all researchers and students at Finnish universities.

Research data

ICPSR’s holdings include thousands of datasets of quantitative survey and interview data as well as some datasets of qualitative textual data. The main emphasis is on data from the US and international comparative studies. Data are available through ICPSR’s web service as SPSS and SAS files, for instance. You can also conduct simple analyses on the web service without having to download the data. Ordering and using the data is free of charge.

Search data from all datasets at ICPSR (Opens in a new tab)

Students and researchers at Finnish universities can download data for free on the ICPSR web service, but they have to log in from a computer inside the university network for the first time and create a MyData login ID (Opens in a new tab) .

Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research

The ICPSR Summer Program, held in Ann Arbor in June–August, familiarises participants with quantitative research methods within different fields of social science research. The paid courses are suitable for post-graduate students, for instance.

ICPSR Summer Program (Opens in a new tab)

Educational resources

ICPSR also offers ample amounts of resources for studying. These include tutorials that use ICPSR datasets, exercises for teaching and independent studying, and a cross tabulation tool that can be utilised in teaching.

ICPSR educational resources (Opens in a new tab)

Competitions and summer jobs for students

ICPSR encourages students to learn quantitative methods and organises competitions for undergraduate students for best research paper that uses datasets available at ICPSR.

Competitions for best research paper (Opens in a new tab)