Research Guides: SOC 480: Online Resources: Best Practice, Statistical, Bibliographic

Sociology Data Sets

American FactFinder
US Census data provides information on social characteristics like disability and educational attainment.
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
Search full text for keywords within cases
Employment and Disability Instiute
Housed at Cornell University with several collections in digital commons
FedStats
FedStats supports a community of practice for over 100 agencies engaged in the production and dissemination of official federal statistic
Field Poll
An independent, non-partisan, media-sponsored public opinion news service. Each year the poll covers a wide range of political and social topics examining California public opinion. Surveys are made at frequent intervals throughout the year. Continuing measures are made of voter support for leading political figures vying for major state and federal offices, job ratings of important political figures and reactions to significant political events. Voter awareness, understanding and predispositions of major campaign issues and salient statewide ballot propositions are also tracked over time. The Field Poll currently issues forty to fifty reports per year. Each report consists of 3-10 pages of text and statistical data, and includes a background section providing details about the interviewing method, sample size, question wording and other technical data.
Gender Equality Data and Statistics
Data on gender from a variety of sources, organized thematically.
General Social Survey (GSS)
Demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions and topics of special interest.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
Largest archive of social science data available for research and instruction purposes.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
The primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.
National Criminal Justice Referral Service
NCJRS services and resources are available to anyone interested in crime, victim assistance, and public safety
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Component of the U.S. Department of Justice with a focus on juveniles in crisis.
US Census: American Fact Finder
Comprehensive demographic and housing data.
Government Sources on Disability Statistics

Bibliographic Websites

Miscarriage of Justice Web Sites
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Research guide created by Emory University
Wolfram Alpha
A computational knowledge search engine with data and charts. Click sources for bibliography. Try this search: crime arcata

Theses & Dissertations

HSU Master's Theses & Projects in Humboldt Digital Scholar
Dissertations and Theses: the Humanities and Social Sciences Collection
Provides access to a comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the Humanities and Social Sciences from around the world. Most U.S. dissertations and theses are available full text. (Does not contain HSU master's theses)

Evaluating Website Content

One of the biggest problems that students have with using websites in their academic work is that they are not sure that the content that they find is accurate. Here are some basic ways to evaluate a website.

What does the domain name tell you?

Who wrote the page? Is there a page author listed? If there is no author, is there a company name? Is there contact information listed? If there is no one listed that takes responsibility for the page you may want take that into consideration.

Here are some links to reliable sites that will help you with your evaluation:

Cornell Web Evaluation Website

UC Berkeley Web Evaluation Tips

John Hopkins Evaluating Sources on the Internet

United Nations Resources

United Nations: un.org

World Bank Documents & Reports by World Bank
More than 14,000 full-text World Bank Group documents, including project appraisal reports, economic and sector works, evaluation reports and studies and working papers.
United Nations Bibliographic Information System (UNBISNET)
Catalogue of United Nations(UN) documents and publications indexed by the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library and the Library of the UN Office at Geneva. The coverage of UNBISnet is from 1979 onward, however, older documents are being added to the catalogue on a regular basis. Also provides links to full text resources if available.
World Health Organization Data and Statistics by World Health Organization (WHO)
"WHO's portal providing access to data and analyses for monitoring the global health situation."
Global Environment Outlook by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
"The GEO Data Portal is the authoritative source for data sets used by UNEP and its partners in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report and other integrated environment assessments.
UN Data
"The UN-system has accumulated over the past 60 years an impressive amount of information. UNdata , developed by the Statistics Division of DESA, is a new powerful tool, which will bring this unique and authoritative set of data not only to the desks of decision makers and analysts, but also to journalists, to students and to all citizens of the world."