Deposit Data

The Child and Family Data Archive (CFData) primarily accepts deposits of data from research projects funded by and preselected for archiving by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). If your study was identified by OPRE for archiving, you can access your deposit workspace here:

Data Deposit Form

If your research produced data about early care and education, families, children, or similar topics but OPRE has not identified your study for inclusion in the CFData Archive, ICPSR has several ways you can archive and share your data. Please email us to discuss what options might be available to you.

What Should My Deposit Include?

Deposits should include all data and documentation necessary to independently read and interpret the data collection. Please refer to the Child and Family Data Archive Data Producer's Guide for instructions on preparing data and documentation as well as the entire process of depositing data with CFData.

For a more comprehensive discussion of best practices in preparing data for sharing, please refer to the ICPSR Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving, or email us directly.

Data File

CFData encourages data producers to deposit datasets as SAS, SPSS, or Stata files. ASCII datasets are also acceptable if accompanied with setup files that provide variable and value labels and missing data declarations (as appropriate). Please contact CFData about depositing data in other formats, including qualitative, audiovisual, or GIS.

Each variable in the dataset should have exhaustive, mutually-exclusive codes. Variable labels and value labels should clearly describe the information or question recorded in that variable. Missing data codes should be defined.

Directly identifying information should be removed from the dataset prior to deposit to protect confidentiality. Please contact CFData if you have question about this.

Documentation

Documentation files are integral to interpreting a dataset and should thoroughly explain the datasets in the collection. Examples of documentation include:

codebooks
data collection instruments
summary statistics
project summaries
bibliographies of publications pertaining to the data

Documentation can be submitted as Microsoft Word, ASCII, and DDI XML files, among other formats. Documentation that has the question text integrated with variable information is preferred.

Description

Every data collection includes a description that provides summary information about the data collection. Descriptions are valuable resources to data users, and include both general information, such as study title and summary, as well as more detailed information about the study design and methodology. Our data curators create the description from information supplied by the data producer in the data deposit form.

Data Collection and Data Management

The data collection stage of research is a critical step. Developing data and documentation within a solid plan and with proper management allows the files to be usable over the long term, whether for sharing with other researchers or within the original research team. The resources below can help with this important stage in your research project.