New Database: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research

Sawyer Library recently added a most impressive databank of polling research. It is sometimes referred to as The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, and is other times referred to by the Center's major database component, iPOLL.

Whatever you call it, The Roper Center, housed at the University of Connecticut, is one of the world's leading archives of social science statistics, specializing in data from surveys of public opinion. The Center's mission includes promoting the informed use of survey research and public opinion information; maintaining, and constantly enlarging, a computer-based library of survey research and public opinion data; developing access tools for researchers to secure required information; and increasing international understanding and promoting cross-national research on political and social issues.

The data held by the Roper Center range from the 1930s, when survey research was in its infancy, to the present. Most of the data are from the United States, but over 50 nations are represented.

iPOLL, their easy-to-use database is the most comprehensive, up-to-date source for US nationwide public opinion available today. A full-text retrieval system, the iPOLL online database is organized at the question-level. The system allows for users to sift through nearly half a million questions archived from national public opinion surveys since 1935. The database is updated daily. iPOLL includes data survey results from academic, commercial and media survey organizations such as Gallup Organization, Harris Interactive, Pew Research Associates, and many more. The data come from all the surveys in the Roper Center archive that have US national adult samples or samples of registered voters, women, African Americans, or any subpopulation that constitutes a large segment of the national adult population.

To access iPOLL, click the large icon link on the homepage, or choose the option from "Data Access" pull-down menu. You will first enter your email and fill out a short registration form, and then accept the terms and conditions.

You will then have access to the files. Search for keywords within the extensive topic list categories. Often the immediate poll results, with questions and numerical breakdowns of responses, will be all you will need.

However, Roper also allows you to manipulate and download much of their data. RoperExpress is a data access tool for on-demand downloads. Faculty and students at Suffolk now have unlimited access to those datasets in the Roper Center collection that are in ASCII or SPSS portable formats. Simply do a search for datasets and the studies accessible for immediate download in RoperExpress are marked with an icon: Although the Center does assume that anyone wishing to do SPSS work with their data is familiar with the program and has access to the software, Roper does provide a page with guidelines for bringing ASCII data files into SPSS. Here users have the opportunity to download sample SPSS syntax files with their corresponding datasets and codebooks. (Please note, SPSS, a productivity software package for "number crunching" is available at the University computer labs, but is not available at Sawyer Library.)

Roper has several pages of tutorials and other educational materials to get people started. You might want to take a look at their 20 page PDF introduction to iPOLL. Their page on the Fundamentals of Polling is also a useful. Those interested can also look at one on Analyzing Polls. There's even a glossary of terms for the field of public opinion research. A Topics at a Glance page provides a sampling of different types of surveys to help you get a sense of what the Roper Center has and does.

Those who are interested in polling data might want to know that Sawyer Library also provides access to Polling the Nations, an online database of public opinion polls containing nearly one half million questions and responses from 14,000 surveys conducted from 1986 through the present in the U.S. and 100 other countries. However, Polling the Nations is less extensive and updated less often. (We also have a limited access contract, so please be sure to logout when you finish using it.) In addition, according to Roper, because nearly 60% of iPOLL questions are linked to respondent level datasets, this new database provides researchers access to the full questionnaire and details of the methodology, codes, demographic variables, etc. instantly. iPOLL also provides search within results, save a search, and search history features.

Public opinion data can be useful for students and faculty in a wide variety of disciplines, from Communication to Marketing to Government to Sociology. So we hope you'll explore this database anytime you need to get some measure of American attitudes.

[FIND Roper Center for Public Opinion Research on our "Databases by Subject" List on the second column of our "Social Sciences" list.]

New Database: Education Research Complete

Sawyer Library is happy to have recently added a high-quality database of educational literature called Education Research Complete (ERC). Delivered via our familiar EBSCOHost platform, this proprietary database from Ebsco is the most wide-ranging database available for the discipline.

Here's how the publisher describes it: "Education Research Complete is the definitive online resource for education research. This massive file offers the world's largest and most complete collection of full text education journals. It is a bibliographic and full text database covering scholarly research and information relating to all areas of education. Topics covered include all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, and all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education, and testing.

Education Research Complete also covers areas of curriculum instruction as well as administration, policy, funding, and related social issues. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,870 journals, as well as full text for more than 1,060 journals. This database also includes full text for 133 books and monographs, and full text for numerous education-related conference papers. "

You might think "I'm not an education major, so this database has nothing to do with me." But many of the topics that Suffolk students (who've never taken an education course) write reports or prepare speeches about do, in fact, relate to education in some way. Topics like school violence, local property taxes, uniforms and dress codes, assessment in higher education, self-esteem issues affecting the young, financial aid for college students and scores of other topics could be found in this database.

If I were interested in girls bullying each other in school, I might start with a search for girls and bullying.

I end up with over 200 possible sources to utilize.

Although many journals, chapters, papers and documents are available full-text in ERC, not everything (especially the most recent articles) will appear with a PDF or HTML symbol underneath the citation. But if that is the case, don't forget to click the 360 (green dot) or other links that will likely be presented. These might well link you to the article you want in another electronic file.

As is always the case with an EBSCOHost database, I could limit the 242 articles I find on girls and bullying by clicking one of the subject headings in the left frame (like Bullying in Schools), or I could limit to Academic Journals in the left frame, or perform the same limit by checking the box for Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals in the right frame, and then updating my results. Do this type of limit if the teacher ever tells you that the articles you use must be scholarly, and cannot come from secondary materials like magazines and newspapers.

We hope that this database will be the go-to file for any of our students and faculty researching anything related to education.

[FIND Education Research Complete on our "Databases by Subject" List on the second column of our "Social Sciences" list.]

Library Systems Alert: Server Replacement, May 27th, 2009

Time of Latest Update: 11:25 am

Status: All Library Systems Are Back Up on the New Server. Our testing indicates we are back to normal. Please advise if you have any issues with the Online Catalog or Database Access. And thank you for your patience!

As we previously warned through the University Email, Library News, and this blog: The Suffolk University Libraries are replacing our systems server TODAY, May 27th.

This process will NOT affect any other University web services (like Blackboard or email). This will ONLY affect library functions. During the server switch library users will not be able to access library databases OFF-campus through the proxy. Nor will they be able to access the online catalog or their circulation records online.

We hope this process will not take too long and we apologize for any inconvenience. And we will try to update this page with information, as we learn it.

For most of our users, the most practical approach to this outage of service is to simply avoid doing research during this time period. However, for those who wish to pursue a "work-around" during the down time, here are a few detailed notes on two major library research functions.

1----TO ACCESS LIBRARY DATABASES

We are sorry, but OFF-campus use of databases is not possible during the server replacement. However ON-Campus, our databases can operate through IP recognition. But you cannot go through the proxy server for access. So, you will need to capture the shortcut and remove the proxy parts of the URL.

First, go to our database list as you normally would, but instead of left-clicking on the name of the database you want, right-click on it and on the box options that display, choose to "copy shortcut." Then paste this shortcut in, say, Notepad (or directly into your browser address bar, if you are very comfortable with web manipulations)

For Academic Search Complete, the shortcut we copy would look like this:

http://0-search.ebscohost.com.library.law.suffolk.edu/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=asp

To make the database recognize our IP WITHOUT going through the proxy server we would remove the bolded parts (a leading 0- and the .library.law.suffolk.edu from the first part of the address) :

http://0-search.ebscohost.com.library.law.suffolk.edu/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=asp

which leaves us with a URL that reads

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=asp

If I copy and paste this stripped-down URL into my browser address bar and hit enter, the database will pick up on my valip IP address (if I am ON CAMPUS) and allow me into the database.

If you are here at the Suffolk Boston campus, you can de-proxyize any of our database links and you should be able to get at the database. But, again, this will unfortunately NOT work if youare at a non-Suffolk (Boston Campus) location.

2-----TO SEARCH FOR BOOKS

Here is an alternative to our Archer Online Catalog (OPAC):

Go to http://www.worldcat.org/account/?page=searchItems

On campus, WorldCat will pick up our Suffolk IP and will enter a 02108 "location" and indicate on the search results pages that "You are connected to the Sawyer Library network." If this does not happen, you can "enter your location" by zip code when you see the appropriate box. For Suffolk, enter 02108.

When you search for an item, the links to libraries will appear below the book information. With a 02108 zip, Suffolk will come up first if we own the book. However, you will not be able to click on "Sawyer Library" to get the call number (since the server is down and the OPAC is non-operational). Therefore, if you wanted to try to find the book in our stacks, try clicking on the next library listed and look for a call number.

For example, I search for Panic : the story of modern financial insanity

and click on the book in results list. I see that Sawyer Library owns the book, but I cannot click into our OPAC by clicking on the Sawyer Library link, so I click on Boston Public Library (BPL), the entry below Sawyer, instead.

I see that BPL owns the book--although all of their copies are checked out or on hold. I also see that they assigned the book the call number of HB3722.P36 2009, which happens to be the same Library of Congress (LC) call number our copy was given. (The fact is that most academic and large public libraries will assign the same LC call number to a book.)

With that call number and the knowledge that Sawyer owns the book, I should be able to find it in our 4th floor stacks. (With one caveat: If the book is checked out or at a secondary location like "New Books" or "Reserve", it would not be on the normal stack shelves.)

NOTE: WorldCat might try to get you to create an account and sign in to create a bibliography, but you do not need to do this to use the service.

If you do not wish to "wait out" the server change, give these work-around techniques a try. And if you need additional assistance, please come and see us at the reference desk. Although we will also be inconvenienced and frustrated by this systems outage, we will try our best (as we always to) to provide research assistance to Suffolk researchers.

New Database: Public Administration Abstracts

Public Management is an active field of study here at Suffolk. But until now, student and faculty researchers in that discipline never had their own professional-level database. They had to sort through all the private sector materials in our excellent Business Source Complete in order to find the public sector articles, or they needed to find appropriate resources through our governmental databases, like Political Science Complete.

Both of those techniques can still be useful, in many instances. But a better starting point for public management research can now be found in Public Administration Abstracts (PAA).

Many years ago, Public Administration Abstracts was a print index and abstracting service published by Sage. Ebsco, our primary supplier of databases, recently acquired the index and besides keeping it up-to-date in an electronic form, they have also digitized the entire archive, bringing the index (of 60,000 records) back to 1974.


Abstracting services are not generally full-text oriented resources. If "Abstracts" is in the title, that is usually an indication that you will see a short summary of any indexed material, but you will not be able to see the entire article or publication. In one sense, this is also true of Public Administration Abstracts. However, because of all the linking we can do between PAA and Business Source Complete, Academic Search Complete, Political Science Complete, and the "custom-linking" we can do with other non-Ebsco databases like JSTOR and LexisNexis Academic, anyone using PAA here at Suffolk will find a surprising number of records will link directly to PDF or HTML full-text. And those that do not might well link out to the full-text, with a few extra clicks, after following the shortcut to our other aggregates via the eJournal Locator (the green-circle "360" link below records in any EbscoHost database).

Suffolk researchers in public management can find a wealth of research articles in a much more consolidated and convenient way, using the familiar and flexible EbscoHost platform, now that we are able to provide them with Public Administration Abstracts.

[FIND Public Administration Abstracts on our "Databases by Subject" List in the "Business and Management" category.]

Notable E-Book: Encyclopedia of Homelessness

The two-volume Encyclopedia of Homelessness describes the basic knowledge of homelessness, including the history of homelessness, the current situation in the United States, and examples of homelessness around the world. This is an online fully searchable ebook available to Suffolk University students and faculty through both Gale Virtual Reference and Sage eReference. Entries cover causes, history, legal issues, governmental policy, legislation and programs, health problems, services, demography, lifestyles, and world perspectives. Specific articles describe homelessness today in eight major American cities, including Boston, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and more than thirty cities and nations around the world.

Some of the more specific topics covered include, social welfare policy, the Great Depression, HIV and AIDS, health care, child care, causes of homelessness, legal advocacy, mental illness, families, food programs, legislation, housing (fair housing laws and shelters), and literature (hobo and tramp).

The Appendix includes a Documentary History of Homelessness (23 primary documents), a Directory of Street Newspapers by state and country, and a Filmography of American Narrative and Documentary Films on Homelessness.

These two volumes are geared toward sociologists, anthropologists, economists, historians, and other social scientists, social policy analysts, program administrators, physicians, social workers, advocacy lawyers, journalists, and students in high school through graduate school.

[FIND The Encyclopedia of Homelessness by entering this title in the Suffolk University Library Catalog or by going to our "Databases by Subject" list and selecting E-Books. Choose either Gale Virtual Reference or Sage eReference, and enter this ebook title.]

New Database: CQ Congress Collection

Sawyer Library recently added another database to our collection of online resources from the CQ (Congressional Quarterly) Press. CQ Congress Collection is, as the name indicates, a group of descriptive and statistical materials supporting research related to the United States Congress.

CQ Press describes it in this way: "CQ Press Congress Collection presents a powerful research and reference tool that provides an analytical survey of the history and development; powers; personalities; current developments; and legislation considered and passed by the United States Congress. A wealth of data with nonbiased commentary is organized under four sections: Public Policy Legislation presents legislative information and analysis under 23 broad topics — such as agriculture, civil rights, national security, and transportation — and hundreds of subtopics. Members of Congress includes biographical, political, and electoral data about every member of Congress since the 79th Congress (additional Congresses will be added periodically). Floor Votes organizes, by Congress and topic, the preferred data for scholarly research. The Legislative Branch provides encyclopedic information, statistical data, legislative analysis, and Supreme Court case summaries relating to the structure and powers of Congress — including committee information — and its relationships with other branches of government and the media."

Although the interface is less than friendly, and linking between sections of the database can be painfully slow, this is indeed "a powerful research and reference tool" for political science research.

It is easy to get a basic profile of a member of Congress, like Barney Frank.



Then we can click various links, like the one for "Key Votes," and see his voting record.

Each of the vote titles is itself a link to further information on that piece of legislation.

You can even compare how members of Congress are rated by various special interest groups. Comparing Senator Ted Kennedy to Senator Mitch McConnell certainly allows for a vivid contrast. The ACU (American Conservative Union)--not to be confused with the ACLU, which has a much different viewpoint!--gives Senator McConnell a 92 rating, while the senior senator from Massachusetts receives an emphatic goose egg.

There's a lot of useful material here, even if it isn't always easy to find. Once you DO find it, you can export data as needed, or create a profile so that you can save your favorite documents and searches for further use.

We hope that those researching public policy and the legislative branch will find this a valuable resource. And don't forget our other useful CQ products, including CQ Researcher (great for Pro-Con analysis of hot button social issues) and CQ Press Political Reference Suite (which includes a wide assortment of online reference materials, from the Political Handbook of the World, to the excellent primary documents resource, the Historic Documents Series).

[FIND CQ Congress Collection on our "Databases by Subject" List in the "Social Sciences" category.]

New Database: DemographicsNow

Sawyer Library recently added another valuable database called DemographicsNow. It allows you to build a demographic (that is, statistical characteristics of a specific population) report after setting your own criteria and stepping through a simple report-building process.

The resource self-describes itself in this way: "DemographicsNow is a comprehensive yet easy-to-use tool that provides highly sought after demographic data that allows prospective entrepreneurs, long-time business owners and students building marketing plans to collect, analyze and quickly act upon that data. With demographic information including income, housing, race, age, education, consumer expenditures and more, users have immediate access to untapped opportunities that can significantly enhance their current business intelligence."

Of course, it's not just business people that find demographic information useful. Many researchers in the social sciences will also find this a useful way to build a quick snapshot of social factors in a particular area!

You would first pick a geographic area--these include state, county, zip codes, and the like. Then you select specifics in your geographic category, then pick the types of statistics you want, or look for the grey tab that says "Report Packages" to choose a "Express Pack" report that covers topics like "Business Location" or Census or Population. You can even do comparisons or ranking reports, and produce maps. Once you build or open the report you want, it can be put into a Printable Version, a PDF Version, or an Excel Version which would allow you to manipulate the data further. (Just look for the buttons at the top of the screen.)

In some cases, you might wonder what some of the terms and statistical categories mean. Look for the "Help and Info" link in the upper left corner for tips and explanations. The glossary, for example, will help define things like a DMA. (A "Designated Market Area" as a "formal term for what is more commonly known as a TV or broadcast market....")

Gale/Cengage, the maker of our InfoTrac and GVRL databases, is the company releasing this Library Edition of DemographicsNow. If you are interested, they have a few informational web resources on the database. These include a PDF descriptive factsheet on the product, as well as a nice PowerPoint presentation that details features and techniques.

We hope you find this resource a useful one!

[FIND DemographicsNow on our "Databases by Subject" List in both the "Business and Management" category and the "Social Sciences" list.]