Pew Research raw survey data now available
Actually the data sets pointed to by FlowingData are part of the Pew Internet (Pew Internet & American Life Project).
For all Pew raw data sets, see: Pew Research Center The Databank
Data is available in the following formats:
- Raw survey data file in both SPSS and comma-delimited (.csv) formats. To protect the privacy of respondents, telephone numbers, county of residence and zip code have been removed from all public data files.
- Cross tabulation file of questions with basic demographics in Word format. Standard demographic categories include sex, race, age, household income, educational attainment, parental status and geographic location (i.e. urban/rural/suburban).
- Survey instrument/questionnaire in Word format. The survey questionnaire provides question and response labels for the raw data file. It also includes all interviewer prompts and programming filters for outside researchers who would like to see how our questions are constructed or use our questions in their own surveys.
- Topline data file in Word format that includes trend data to previous surveys in which we have asked each question, where applicable.
As far as I know, the use of topic maps with survey and other data to create “profiles” of particular communities remains unexplored. May not be able to predict the actions of any individual but probabilistic predictions about members of a group may be close enough. Interesting. Predicting the actions of any individual may be NP-Hard but also irrelevant for most purposes.