Finding data overview

ESDS provides access to over 5,000 digital data collections for research and teaching purposes covering an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, and spanning many disciplines and themes.

Using our online Data Catalogue you can search and browse our data collections. For each collection we provide, at no cost, a detailed catalogue record and links to contextual information, such as user guides, questionnaires, technical reports and so on.

Our search tools enable you to search by variables (for survey data), major studies, latest releases or use the UK Data Archive’s HASSET thesaurus. We can also help you identify data located in other archives in the UK and from other data archives around the world.

A link to access the data can be found in each catalogue record. You will be required to register to access the data, using federated access management (shibboleth) authentication. To analyse our data, users usually need to have access to appropriate data analysis software, although a range of data are available to explore, tabulate and chart online. See How to access data.

For information about how we manage our collections, see How we curate data.