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SSRI~ Workshop: A Treasure Trove of Data: Conducting Research using Federal Statistical Surveys

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Gale Boyd, Mark Thomas, Joel Herndon

Are you interested in knowing how residential mobility affects voter turnout? What factors motivate individuals with concerns about their mental health to seek support via online communities rather than formal treatment? How commute time affects average adult body mass index? What factors make a U.S. adolescent more likely to carry a handgun? Whether motorcycle helmet laws reduce fatalities and/or costs for medical services and work productivity losses? Each of those questions is complex, requiring information about a diverse range of factors across different levels of analysis. And yet each can be answered using data that have already been collected and made available by the U.S. federal government. Where can such data be found, how can they be accessed, and who has the right to use them? In this workshop, Duke libraries and the Triangle Research Data Center will discuss the rich sources of both public-use and confidential data available to Duke researchers and provide an overview of how they can be accessed. Participants will leave the workshop with an understanding of how to search and identify federal data sources, where and how to access the data and their documentation, and the differences between public-use and confidential data.

Contact: Alexandra Cooper