Today, I attended a workshop at USC titled "Finding Government Data for Social Justice." While I have used the US Census (https://www.census.gov/), the American Community Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/), and the California Department of Education (https://www.cde.ca.gov/) to access data, this workshop helped to teach me a few additional places and reports to look for.
- For general governmental data, check out congress.gov
- Your university (if you are affiliated with one) or the local library might also have "Proquest Congressional." SEarch for that as well.
Since I work in the field of education here are a few additional tips for my ed colleagues:
- National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/
- Digest of Educational Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/
- The Digest has a useful report titled "The Condition of Education" that is produced annually: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/
- The U.S. Department of Education: https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/landing.jhtml?src=image
Many of my students could really use these sources to help contextualize their studies, so I'm excited to share these resources with them.
I also love sharing search tools and tips with my students. A great little tip I learned today for Google searches is to ask for .gov websites. To do that, enter your key word(s) and then type site: .gov.
Another Google search tip that I found helpful: inurl: [keyword]. This will allow you to find sources that have the keyword within the URL.
Happy data browsing!
