Survey data on Internet uses

by Eszter Hargittai on March 14, 2009

New Pew Internet & American Life siteThe Pew Internet & American Life Project (PIP), a very important source on data about Americans’ Internet uses, has completely revamped its Web site. Among other things, it is now even easier to download their data than before. These are made available in SPSS format only. I use StatTransfer in such cases (for conversion to Stata), any other tools that have worked well for folks?

They also have a handy tool for searching their data base of questions. We’ve been working on something similar in my lab for a bunch of Internet-related surveys although stopped the process due to lack of funding. Pew was smart to work with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at UCONN on this since they have so much experience in this domain. Perhaps worthy of note is the fact that a search on the same term on the Roper and the PIP sites does not yield the same results. While some Pew data seem to be available through the Roper site, these seem to originate from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and not from PIP. That’s something to keep in mind when looking for Internet-related data.

For those not interested in accessing the raw data directly, PIP’s full reports continue to be easily available by topic on the site as are some stand-alone figures from these. Overall, the amount of material PIP is making easily available is a wonderful resource so many thanks to the great folks there!

{ 4 comments }

1

tom s. 03.14.09 at 2:37 pm

All your links are failing, so I guess that means the Pew site is down. I’m sure there’s a joke there somewhere.

2

Eszter Hargittai 03.14.09 at 2:48 pm

Yikes! Obviously they were working just fine as I was writing the post, otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to link to. I’ve alerted the Pew folks, hopefully it’s just a temporary glitch.

3

Eszter Hargittai 03.14.09 at 3:04 pm

Seems to be all set now.

4

Andrew 03.15.09 at 1:18 am

Awesome find. I am just the sort of geek who is excited by wonderful data sites like this. Thanks for the heads up.

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