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Research Guides

Integrated Social Sciences Program: Data & Visualization

Guide for the online Integrated Social Sciences program

Data in the Social Sciences

Social scientists use data to analyze and examine social conditions and ideas. This data can come from qualitative or quantitative research methods. Examples of social science data include survey data (opinion polls, voting records), nonsurvey data (images, maps, sound, video), raw measurements (numeric tables, government statistics), text (fieldnotes, transcripts, blogs, emails) and spatial data (zonal, event, spatial referent). 

To learn more about how data is used in the social sciences, check out the Glossary of Social Science Terms and How to Cite Data properly. 

Finding Data

Data Visualization

Colorful orb representing treemap of mammals

A voronoi treemap of the mammals, based on the Tree of Life dataset. Licenses under CC BY 2.0