ICPSR is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research and is the world's largest social science data archive.  

ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

ICPSR is an international consortium of about 700 academic institutions and research organizations, provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.  Lehigh University has an institutional membership to ICPSR. 

Keep in mind that the datasets archived at ICPSR are formatted for use with statistical software such as SPSS, SAS and Stata, etc.

Getting Started

Before you begin your search, you need to set up an online account through the ICPSR Website.  

Even if you are accessing the ICPSR site from on campus, you will still be asked to login using your personal account.  You are usually asked to login at the point of download.  A nice feature of the account is that it keeps track of past datasets you've downloaded.

To create an account, access the ICPSR Website from this link:

ICPSR will recognize you as a Lehigh University affiliate and you will then have the ability to create your own MyData account.