Social Science Data Repository
A repository with curated social science datasets for pedagogical purposes supported by an undergraduate fellowship
Motivation
One of the biggest challenges for social science faculty teaching statistics and data science courses is developing data examples that are relevant, interesting, and structured. Many instructors at University of Maryland had worked through updates to their courses to incorporate programming to keep up with modern data analysis techniques, but incorporating engaging and relevant datasets proved to be more difficult. Using project-based learning and incorporating real-life datasets is invaluable for learning how exactly data science can be applied in the discipline, but the burden on faculty to clean, manage, and test the datasets is huge. The BSOS Data Repository was built as a response to calls from faculty across various BSOS departments about the need for high quality social science datasets.
The University of Maryland Teaching and Learning Transformation Center (TLTC) Experiential Learning program-level grant gave us the opportunity to build this data repository, alongside a new undergraduate Data Curation Fellowship.
Data Curation Fellowship
The BSOS Data Curation Fellowship was developed at the University of Maryland’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences to build up the data repository and give students the opportunity to learn to curate, clean, document, and publish social science datasets for teaching and research. Our fellowship teams of three undergraduate students work with real research data from psychology, public health, elections, and more, turning raw datasets into well-documented resources.
The Data Curation Fellowship gives BSOS students hands-on experience in data management, documentation, and scholarly communication. Students learn industry-standard practices for data cleaning, quality assurance, and metadata creation while working on datasets that directly support faculty research and undergraduate instruction.
Finding Data
The BSOS Data Repository is designed to make it easier for social science instructors to find the datasets that they want to use with as little extra work needed. To that end, these datasets are not only curated with multiple version, but also include comprehensive documentation, summaries, visual dashboards, and example code to make the process as painless as possible.
