Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Roper iPoll

New Database: Health Poll Database

We now have access to a second database from the Roper Center called Health Poll Database. Here is their description of it:

The Health Poll database is the most comprehensive database for health-related U.S. survey questions, covering eighty years of national polling. Searchable questions and results, demographic crosstabs, and trends are available on every topic related to health, from social determinants and influences on health to insurance, costs and health-care utilization.

Access to this database is available on and off campus via links found on the following pages of the library website:

Please share news about this new resource with faculty and students you work with.

New Database: Roper iPoll

Roper iPoll provides access not only to polls conducted by the Roper Center but also hundreds of other organizations (corporations, nonprofit groups, research institutes, news organizations, etc.) Not only will the database be useful for anyone looking for data about political attitudes and opinions, it may also be useful for those looking for marketing info (including consumer preferences) and for those who just need a dataset that they can download, manipulate, and analyze.

To give a snapshot of what’s in the database, here’s a quick run through of what happens if you type something like “religion” into the search box:

  • Type in a keyword like “religion” and your search results page may suggest a controlled vocabulary term to re-run your search with
  • Search results displayed in two tabs: one has the data on specific survey questions that match your keyword and the other has links to the complete survey or study where those questions matching your keyword appear
  • You can filter your search results by “Contents” if you want to isolate just the items with crosstabs, downloadable datasets, CSV files, SPSS data, etc.
  • Filter by “Decades” to get to surveys conducted as far back as the 1930s
  • Filter by “Countries”
  • Filter by the organization that did the survey or study (for my “religion” search, that turned up 548 organizations)