Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS)

Housed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS) maintains the country's third-largest archive of computer-readable social science data. Its holdings include national and international economic, electoral, demographic, financial, health, and public opinion data. IRSS maintains a Web-based, searchable catalog of the more than 2,800 studies and series in its data holdings. The catalog contains abstracts... (more info)

Housed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS) maintains the country's third-largest archive of computer-readable social science data. Its holdings include national and international economic, electoral, demographic, financial, health, and public opinion data. IRSS maintains a Web-based, searchable catalog of the more than 2,800 studies and series in its data holdings. The catalog contains abstracts for each, and many studies can be downloaded for data analysis. Another tool, the Public Opinion Poll Question Database, allows any researcher to search for specific poll questions among the more than 230,000 questions in the Institute's archive. Since 1965, the Odum Institute has operated the Louis Harris Data Center, the national depository for publicly available public opinion survey data collected by Louis Harris and Associates, Inc. More than 1,200 Harris Polls from as early as 1958 are archived. The Institute also contains more than 530 public opinion polls of state populations gathered from members of the National Network of State Polls. Other public opinion data archived at IRSS include the Carolina Polls, General Social Surveys collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and polls from major broadcasting networks and newspapers. The Institute also has an extensive collection of United States Census data, including one of the most complete holdings for 1970 Census files. With the UNC-CH Center for the Study of the American South, the Odum Institute conducts the twice-yearly Southern Focus Poll, a representative sample of 800 households in the South and 400 households elsewhere in the nation. Other major sources of data at the Institute include the North Carolina State Data Center, which distributes North Carolina Census data, and the National Center for Health Statistics. IRSS also serves as the local repository for the World Fertility Surveys, and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS).