Social Science Data and Statistics Sources

Afrobarometer is non-partisan, pan-African research institution conducting public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, the economy and society in 30+ countries repeated on a regular cycle. A leading source of high-quality data on what Africans are thinking.

The AmericasBarometer, LAPOP’s largest survey research project, is a periodic study of 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere, with stratified nationally representative samples drawn in each country, a common questionnaire core, and country-specific modules. It is the only scientifically rigorous comparative survey of democratic values and behaviors that covers all independent countries in North, Central, and South America, as well as a significant number of countries in the Caribbean. The AmericasBarometer measures attitudes, evaluations, experiences, and behavior in the Americas using national probability samples of voting-age adults. Standardizing methods and a common core questionnaire permit valid comparisons across countries and over time on topics including the economy, rule of law, state capacity, trust in institutions, individual values, corruption, security, and more. The AmericasBarometer was launched in 2004/05, with 11 countries, and quickly grew to cover 34 countries in the Americas. The latest round of the AmericasBarometer was carried out in 2021 and includes over 64,000 interviews in 22 countries.

Arab Barometer is a nonpartisan research network that provides insight into the social, political, and economic attitudes and values of ordinary citizens across the Arab world. We have been conducting high quality and reliable public opinion surveys in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006. We are the longest-standing and the largest repository of publicly available data on the views of men and women in the MENA region. Our findings give a voice to the needs and concerns of Arab publics.

AsianBarometer represents the largest ever, comparative survey in Asia, covering East, Southeast, South and Central Asia. It focuses on daily lives of ordinary people (bumi putra) and their relationships to family, neighborhood, workplace, social and political institutions and market place. Country-wide face-to-face surveys use standardized instruments designed around a common research framework.

The Standard Eurobarometer was established in 1974. Each survey consists of approximately 1000 face-to-face interviews per country. Reports are published twice yearly. Special Eurobarometer reports are based on in-depth thematic studies. Flash Eurobarometers are ad hoc thematic telephone interviews conducted at the request of any service of the European Commission.

Gallup Polls conducts public opinion polls on political, social, and economic issues.

The ISSP is a cross-national collaboration programme conducting annual surveys on diverse topics relevant to social sciences.
Established in 1984 by its founding members Australia, Germany, Great Britain and the US, the ISSP has since included members covering various cultures around the globe. Its institutional members, each of them representing one nation, consist of academic organizations, universities, or survey agencies. Since its foundation, over one million respondents have participated in the surveys of the ISSP. All collected data and documentation is available free of charge.

Latinobarómetro is an annual public opinion survey that involves some 19,000 interviews in 18 Latin American countries, representing more than 400 million inhabitants.

This is a think tank that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research.

Pew Research Center regularly makes available the full datasets that underlie most of they reports. They typically do not publish the dataset at the same time as the report. That’s because it takes some time to complete all reporting for a given study and to clean and prepare the data for public release. The lag time varies by study, and some data (including surveys of certain populations, such as scientists or foreign policy experts) are never released, in order to protect respondent confidentiality. Survey data are cleaned to remove any information that could be used to identify individual respondents. Individuals will need to fill out a brief registration before downloading data.

The World Values Survey is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholars, with the WVS association and secretariat headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The survey, which started in 1981, seeks to use the most rigorous, high-quality research designs in each country. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. Moreover the WVS is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones.