Here are a few quick links to commonly-used sources of data & statistics:
Welcome to the Geoffrey R. Weller guide to finding data and statistics, with a focus on Canadian information.
Quick search: Use the following search box to quickly search for data and statistics across Canadian and American sources using the <odesi> search. This collection includes Statistics Canada, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and popular opinion polls
This guide covers finding data and statistics from surveys and censuses, focused on the population of Canada.
Are you looking to find out characteristics of a population or group - maybe the median income in your neighborhood, or the prevalence of a specific disease? You'll want to check out the Statistics section.
Looking for data you can analyze yourself, using software like Excel of SPSS? The Data section is where you want to look.
In these data sets, each individual respondent will be represented by a row, and each column will represent the answer to a question asked on the survey. For example:
| Respondent_ID | eye_colour | hair_colour |
| 1 | blue | blonde |
| 2 | brown | brown |
| 3 | green | brown |
Each row above represents a person, and each column represents a variable, or answer to a question. Of course, the data sets available here are much bigger, with thousands of rows and hundreds of columns.
