2000 U.S. Census Data Project

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) will make data from the 2000 Census of Population and Housing of the United States available to social and behavioral scientists at colleges and universities throughout the country. In doing so, it will collect, preserve, enhance, and distribute data developed by the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, ICPSR will provide training to data users and data librarians in the academic community in order to ensure the most effective use of these data by the largest possible number of users. The project will enable researchers to use these data efficiently and economically for research and instructional purposes. This project has six key activities: (1) Acquisition and long-term archiving of substantially all data produced by the 2000 Censuses of Population and of Housing; (2) Re-formatting census data to facilitate use in statistical analysis programs; (3) Development of standardized documentation for census data that is compliant with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard; (4) Development of new data products, including special subsamples and special summary files, that serve the needs of academic researchers; (5) Provision of web-based access to the data that will include a data-finder and custom subsetting capabilities; and (6) Provision of training and outreach activities to encourage use of the data. The Census is a unique source of data for a wide range of research topics about the United States. The 2000 Census of Population and Housing will constitute the single most important starting point for basic and applied social research during the decade of the 2000s. Census data have value in many ways, but in brief they enable three basic research undertakings: (1) By themselves they are the basic source for research about the attributes of the U.S. population, housing stock, and economy, for the nation as a whole as well as its regions. Only the Census permits comparable research in depth for the entire country and its regions, and it includes detailed information for minority and other special populations. (2) Census data will be needed to provide contextual information for other types of investigations, such as research on school, hospital, and administrative records. Census data also provide denominators for calculating rates and proportions in many areas of research, not to mention the traditional role in apportioning legislative representation, and in the study of reapportionment. (3) The data will be vital to the design of research, including as the most obvious example the drawing of survey samples. This project will collect and preserve those data, add them to ICPSR's large collection of data from earlier censuses, and widely distribute those data and information about them.