ECON 3063: Narrative Economics

General Social Survey (GSS) contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings.

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.

From the CDC, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is the nation's premier system of health-related telephone surveys that collect state data about U.S. residents regarding their health-related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions, and use of preventive services. Established in 1984 with 15 states, BRFSS now collects data in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories. BRFSS completes more than 400,000 adult interviews each year, making it the largest continuously conducted health survey system in the world.

The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) monitors six types of health-risk behaviors that contribute to the leading causes of death and disability among youth and adults, including behaviors that contribute to unintentional injuries and violence, sexual behaviors related to unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, HIV infection, alcohol and other drug use, tobacco use, dietary behaviors, and physical activity.

The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) measures the amount of time people spend doing various activities, such as paid work, childcare, volunteering, and socializing.

The Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) program provides data on expenditures, income, and demographic characteristics of consumers in the United States. The CE program provides these data in tables, databases, news releases, reports, and public use microdata files.

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.

This is the new platform for accessing recent Census Bureau data. FYI, the Census Bureau stopped releasing new data in American FactFinder (AFF) at the end of June 2019 and transitioned to data.census.gov for data releases formerly on AFF.

Browse data sets by topic, or search the data catalog. You can limit your results to geospatial data sets. Federal and non-federal (state, county, municipal, etc.) data sources are available.

DHS are nationally-representative household surveys that provide data for a wide range of monitoring and impact evaluation indicators in the areas of population, health, and nutrition. You can find data on knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Step-by-step guidelines for dataset users from registration to dataset analysis are available. Datasets are available for free after a simple registration process.

The Spatial Data Repository provides geographically-linked health and demographic data from the DHS Program.

General Social Survey (GSS) contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings.

Dataset Search is a search engine for datasets. Using a simple keyword search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web.

LivWell is a global longitudinal database which provides a range of key indicators related to women’s socioeconomic status, health and well-being, access to basic services, and demographic outcomes. Data are available at the sub-national level for 52 countries and 447 regions. A total of 134 indicators are based on 199 Demographic and Health Surveys for the period 1990-2019, supplemented by extensive information on socioeconomic and climatic conditions in the respective regions for a total of 190 indicators. The resulting data offer various opportunities for policy-relevant research on gender inequality, inclusive development, and demographic trends at the sub-national level.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The Add Health cohort has been followed into young adulthood with four in-home interviews, the most recent in 2008, when the sample was aged 24-32. Add Health is re-interviewing cohort members in a Wave V follow-up from 2016-2018 to collect social, environmental, behavioral, and biological data with which to track the emergence of chronic disease as the cohort moves through their fourth decade of life. Add Health combines longitudinal survey data on respondents’ social, economic, psychological and physical well-being with contextual data on the family, neighborhood, community, school, friendships, peer groups, and romantic relationships, providing unique opportunities to study how social environments and behaviors in adolescence are linked to health and achievement outcomes in young adulthood. The fourth wave of interviews expanded the collection of biological data in Add Health to understand the social, behavioral, and biological linkages in health trajectories as the Add Health cohort ages through adulthood, and the fifth wave of data collection continues this biological data expansion.

New York City Census FactFinder (NYC CFF) is New York City’s online map portal for querying Census information. It was developed by the Department of City Planning and Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. The application provides up-to-date Census data for locations in New York City. To begin a search, choose the type of geographic area you want to profile (census tract or Neighborhood Tabulation Area). Then pick your location. You can search by address, intersection, place of interest, census tract, subway station, or neighborhood. Alternatively, you can simply use the select tool on the interactive map to choose a census tract or Neighborhood Tabulation Area to be profiled. Multiple census tracts can also be selected using the radius tool or by using the select tool and the control key together.

NYC Open Data makes the wealth of public data generated by various New York City agencies and other City organizations available for public use. As part of an initiative to improve the accessibility, transparency, and accountability of City government, this catalog offers access to a repository of 1,500+ government-produced, machine-readable data sets. The data sets are available in a variety of machine-readable formats and are refreshed when new data becomes available. Data is presented by category, by City agency, or by other City organization.

Simmons OneView provides survey analysis and planning software that includes data from recent Simmons' national consumer studies. Here you can find data on consumer demographics and buying behavior. This is not an intuitive database - but there is a good series of training tutorials available. You can also reach out to the Columbia Business & Economics Library librarians for help.

This is the data used to compute the Consumer Sentiment Index.

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.