ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research)

When you find a study that you wish to download, you will see a variety of download links on the study home page that enable you to download individual documentation files, or application-specific bundles (at either the study or dataset level). The "Quick Download" button provides multiple options on mouse over.

Before downloading the data, you may want to do two things to assure that the study meets your needs.

• Review the description of the study. This may include important information about file formats and other unique characteristics of the data.

• View the documentation files, including the codebook.

Note that in downloading data from ICPSR, you signify that you agree not to share the data with anyone not authorized by ICPSR to receive it. You further agree to the terms of use.

Many ICPSR datasets have ready-to-use SPSS data in a .sav file: 

• For .sav files, remove them from the .zip folder and then Open Other File in SPSS or else use the GET command in the SPSS console.

Other ICPSR datasets download a folder where one file has a .sps ending and a file called data.txt

• For .sps files with a data.txt file, you will need to use the SPSS Import process. The video below will show you how to import the .sps file and use it to read the data.txt file correctly into SPSS.