ABSTRACT
How do we get the data necessary to execute our research designs and test hypotheses? Often it is possible to use information others have collected and made available to the public. This is fortunate, because it is rare that even a very well funded project would allow the researcher to travel to many cities or states, let alone to all the nations of the world, to collect information first-hand. This chapter introduces some of the major published sources of data that political scientists use in their research and suggests some strategies for discovering other sources. The chapter concludes with a description of content analysis, a technique for turning verbal messages into quantitative data.
