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And all sorts of other related issues, such as access to medical services for the uninsured and poor.
This is another capstone project for another very dedicated (and inspirational) Poverty Studies student.
This research guide is likely a work-in-progress, particularly given the student's interest in expanding the scope to include some international comparisons.
This actually is a Spring Term course, but Pam Luecke is already meeting with the students this term and they will have some reading and writing to do within the next couple weeks.
This class (18 students), along with Kip Pirkle's BUS 391 class (18 students), will be in China for most of the Spring Term.
Here is the research guide.
First stop: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
This certainly is the biggest source of data, but an interesting cross-reference there reminded me about the Education Commission of the States, one of those specialized professional associations of officials who work in state government.
(We have them listed here on our site.)
And the ECS Web site has an absolutely beautiful collection of data on NCLB, including "Assessment."
"I'm supposed to use SSRN to look up some information for my econ class and I can't figure out how to access it through W&L - I looked through the library website's links but didn't see it anywhere - could you help point me in the right direction?"
We do not have a link to the Social Science Research Network because we are not a subscriber, which would entitle us to access to everything in the database.
Nevertheless, a lot of the stuff (papers) in the database are available free-of-charge.
The link is here.
Once you have done a search ("Quick Search" is in the upper-right corner), you will see little icons which will indicate which papers are free and which ones are off-limits (unless you want to whip out your credit card).
For the freebies, you will have to scroll down each paper's page to find a section headed "SSRN Electronic Paper Collection," where you can find links to the text.
Let me know if you run into any trouble.
Just out of curiosity, who is the instructor who is requiring the use of SSRN?
Student is looking for the number terrorist incidents by country in 2003 or 2004.
This is challenging and I could not locate a summary by country, but chronologies are available. The State Department offers Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003.
this has a chronology of incidents in appendix A. This publication changes its name in 2004 to Country Reports on Terrorism, but it seems to drop the chronology.
A better source for this information is Worldwide Incidents Tracking System which will allow you to search for incidents by several factors including date ranges beginning with 2004. The results open in a table, which can be saved and with a lot of cleanup, eventually turned into a spread sheet to run a cross tab by country or imported into Access to run a summary query by country.
I can think of a couple other reputable sources:
The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base has a database of incidents.
Israel's Institute for Counter-Terrorism has -- or had -- a great database for this sort of thing, until they started upgrading it.
[Dick]
Does Washington and Lee have any databases that access the Annual Survey of Manufactures? I found these reports online at the Census website, but couldn't find any reports before 1991. Thanks so much.
I do not know of any online source for that specific report from the ancient pre-Internet days.
However, we do have printed copies of earlier years, shelved in the U.S. Government Depository collection down on Lower Level 2.
Unfortunately, not all years in the are conveniently shelved in one chronological order, primarily because the series was re-organized and re-titled several times. These entries for ASM are in Annie, the library catalog.
"I am a senior writing my economics capstone on employment in Latin America... I am looking for data from 1990-2005 on Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Panama and Peru. I need unemployment, GDP, Exchange rate, real wage, export, import total debt and total asset statistics of each country."
My response:
(1) Since you are concerned with Latin American countries, the first source I think of is UCLA's Statistical Abstract of Latin America, which, unfortunately, is available only in printed form -- not online.
We keep the most recent edition in the Reference collection and the earlier volumes in the stacks.
I think you could get the data you need from looking in several volumes.
(2) Another possibility is the World Bank's World Development Indicators, which we have in printed form and on a CD-ROM.
The advantage to the CD-ROM is that it has extensive time-series data in most categories, meaning you do not need to look at several volumes to get two decades of numbers. Here is a description of WDI.
You can get some idea of what data is in WDI by browsing the 2006 edition in the World Bank site.
Please let me know if the above sources do not do the job.
A student is looking for statistics on environmental factors and trade. She wants to investigate the relationship of liberalizing trade restrictions and the environment. The measures she is using for trade liberalizations is (Imports+Exports)/GDP and she want measurements of SO2 and CO2 for the environmental factors. The easiest source of this data is World Development Indicators on CD-ROM (latest edition is on permanent reserve).
A student is looking for international trade data, but rather than the normal "goods and services" figure, he is just looking for services. There is a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), but they are still under negotiations. Trade data for services is limited, but trade data is available from participating countries in the WTO International Trade Statistics database:
There are other sources for this data, but are not as easy to use or are not freely available:
EuroStat
OECD
A message from a student:
"I'm currently in Professor Beckley's Poverty Capstone course and am trying to start my research paper on gender inequality in education in South Africa and Rwanda. Most of the information I am finding (using an old electronic study guide you put together for me for a different class) regards the "female face of AIDS in Africa" and AIDS education. Is there any way we could meet and discuss ways to further my research and dig a lot deeper than the limited articles I am finding on proquest, jstor, etc? I want to find out how to really do research."
Here is the research guide, which I am likely to continue working on.
[Not to be too mushy about this, but meeting and talking with this student about her research was truly inspirational.]
A local person asked whether we had the annual reports of the U.S. Secretary of War/War Department for the years around the Spanish-American War (1898).
Annie appears to indicate that we do not. (FWIW, we did not become a Depository Library until 1910.)
After a few minutes, I did find the complete reports in the LexisNexis Serial Set Digital Collection.
We may -- may -- also have the reports within the printed volumes of the Serial Set. (The Serial Set volumes are listed in Annie, but the thousands of individual reports, documents, etc. within the volumes are not listed individually in Annie.)
However, the person who asked the question was too impatient to wait to find out if we had the volumes, and said she was going to UVa to find the reports.
The 20 or so students in Professor Richardson's 101 course will be writing brief papers on some aspect of the relationship between the media and society (children, violence, negative political advertising, whatever), with an emphasis on incorporating research from scholarly/academic/refereed journals.
Here is the research guide.
"I'm in the Sociology Data Analysis class and I am struggling to find a data set that fits my topic. I would like to study whether prescription drug abuse is on the rise...especially on college campuses. If possible, it would also be interesting for me to see if this drug of choice is more common among more academically demanding institutions.
I've browsed most of the sites you list on our course guide, but I just can't seem to find anything. Most things that come up are political, health care related. I was hoping maybe you had some suggestions as to where to look or how to find a data set to use for this topic. "
LexisNexis Statistical was a good starting point.
My response to the student:
(1) I think Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse might be a source of data, although I am not at all certain they (or anyone else) has exactly what you want.
Take a look at their online reports, especially the ones dated August 2006, June 2006, and July 2005.
(2) One researcher refers to the Federal Government's (U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) National Survey on Drug Use and Health as "the premier data source on the prevalence of substance use."
You can see these reports here.
I am inclined to believe you will not find anything as focused as you would like, but at least you can see what is possible.
(3) Another Federal agency, the National Library of Medicine, offers this site on prescription drug abuse.
(4) The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy recently released a report on teens and prescription drugs, but I think they mostly refer to data from the other agencies, above.
Please let me know if you have any further questions.