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ILRST 2110 Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences II : Additional Data Sources

What's on this page?

This page contains a number of data sources on varying topics in the social sciences, including health and sociological data.

Polling and Public Opinion Data

Cornell has access to a wealth of polling and public opinion data. Here are a few sources below. For additional sources, please see the Polling and Public Opinion Sources Online guide.

Social Surveys

US Immigration Statistics

Additional Social Science Data Sources

Mass Shooting Data

This box contains links to data sources for data on mass shootings in the United States. Each data source has a different methodology and slightly different data, so you will need to take a look at them to determine which is the best source for your research.

Veterans Administration’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families - Satisfaction Survey Data

The Veterans Administration’s Supportive Services for Veteran Families program aims to “to promote housing stability among very low-income Veteran families who reside in or are transitioning to permanent housing.” The VA outsources those services to a network of 200+ selected nonprofits, which it grants hundreds of millions of dollars per year. When a veteran exits a grantee’s program, they’re invited to complete a satisfaction survey. The Data Liberation Project filed a FOIA request for the survey data, and received three spreadsheets in return (among other documents), detailing nearly 40,000 anonymized responses from fiscal years 2016–20 and 2022.

Note: The data can be a bit tricky to interpret if you have never worked with a data dictionary before. Please feel free to email a reference librarian to make an appointment for help if needed!

Cast Vote Records: A Database of Ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election

While electoral records of individual ballots are available in some jurisdictions, the data are not collected in any consistent way. Researchers (primarily at Yale and MIT) downloaded and standardized publicly available ballot records, resulting in "a uniquely granular administrative dataset for studying voting behavior and election administration." 

"Usage Notes: Please read the included data descriptor before interpreting this data. In particular, please note that discrepancies in cast vote records versus reported returns should not be considered as sufficient evidence for election misconduct."