CJ 3170: Criminal Justice Research Methods - Prof. Hiropoulos Ramatlhodi

Secondary data is data that someone has not collected or created themselves.  It uses existing data generated by government agencies, healthcare facilities etc. as part of record keeping.

How do I find secondary data sets?

Using a search engine, such as Google or Bing is a great place to start just by using keywords about your topic (ex. "violent offender rates California").  This will often result with some major sources of data,, but always remember to dig further into the sources to look for complete, downloadable datasets.

Publicly Available Data Sources for this assignment:

• Public Policy Institute of California’s Data Depot
• The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
• The Pew Research Center
• The General Social Survey
• The World Bank Data Catalog
• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program 
• Bureau of Justice Statistics 
• FBI National Use-of-Force Data Collection
• Washington Post database of fatal shootings by an on-duty police officer 

Reference List Example:

O’Donohue, W. (2017). Content analysis of undergraduate psychology textbooks (ICPSR 21600; Version V1) [Data set]. ICPSR. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36966.v1

In-Text Examples:

Parenthetical citation: (O’Donohue, 2017)
Narrative citation: O’Donohue (2017)