The ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research ) was founded in 1962 at the University of Michigan. Founded initially as a collaboration between 21 U.S. universities, the consortium currently includes 325 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada and several hundred other institutions in Europe, Oceania, Asia and Latin America. Today ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.
The consortium maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. ICPSR’s educational activities include the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, a comprehensive curriculum of intensive courses in research design, statistics, data analysis, and social methodology. ICPSR also leads several initiatives that encourage use of data in teaching, particularly in undergraduate instruction.
UniData, thanks to the experience gained by ADPSS-Sociodata, has been participating in the consortium since several years. The membership allows a direct access to the entire ICPSR archive, so ADPSS-Sociodata can expanding the dataset available to its users. Membership also provides the opportunity to participate, with economic facilitation, to the courses offered by ICPSR in summer (Summer Programme in Quantitative Methods of Social Research).
Moreover, UniData is the official representative for the consortium in Italy. The participants institutions to ICPSR that reside out of USA and Canada must address to their own national representative for any information and data. In the Italian case has been created a network of universities that have acquired the membership together. In particular UniData manages to reports, requests and archiving of data produced by this consortium.
The Italian network, founded in December 1999, it was later expanded. The main aim is to encourage the inter-university cooperation supporting the promotion of joint research projects and exchange of data stored in the individual departments. Currently 13 Departments and 10 different Italian universities participating in the network.
For more details see the ICPSR website.
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