The Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research has released online the Social Science Variables Database.

The SSVD currently provides a searchable interface for 33,879 variables included in 70 data series archived by ICPSR. Search results from the SSVD present question text, variable labels, and values with frequency distributions where available.

Among the social, economic, political, health, and public opinion survey and other data series included in the SSVD are:

• American National Election Studies Cumulative Data File, 1948-2000
• General Social Surveys, 1972-2002: [Cumulative File]
• Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File, 1970-1999
• National Crime Victimization Survey, 1992-2000, Incident-Level Concatenated File
• National Health Interview Survey, 2001 [eight subfiles]
• National Household Education Survey, 1999 [three subfiles]
• National Survey of Black Americans, Waves 1-4
• Polity III: Regime Type and Political Authority, 1800-1994
• World Values Surveys, 1981-1984, 1990-1993, and 1995-1997.

Hyperlinks from SSVD records are provided to download ICPSR-archived data sets and documentation. Penn users offcampus should know that downloading data sets archived by ICPSR requires using the Penn Library Web E-Resource Locator's proxy server.

The SSVD uses Data Documentation Initiative-formatted metadata to update and supersede ICPSR Study no. 4500, the ICPSR Variables Database, which provided text and frequencies for over 65,000 separate variables from 165 popular data series. ICPSR 4500 was last updated in September 1990 and was produced from OSIRIS-formatted codebooks.

For more information:
Lauris Olson, Social Sciences Bibliographer