As a part of our commitment to transparency in research, MDRC makes available Public Use or Restricted Access Files from many of our evaluations to allow independent researchers to further explore and build upon findings published in MDRC reports and policy briefs. Data are available from evaluations of welfare-to-work and post-employment programs, interventions for hard-to-employ individuals and for vulnerable families, and K-12 education programs for improving student reading skills and enhancing teacher professional development. All data files are accompanied by codebooks, data use recommendations, and other pertinent documentation.

Some Public Use and Restricted Access Files are housed at MDRC, whereas others are housed at one of three national repositories of research data:

• University of Michigan, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

• U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance

• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)

All MDRC Public Use and Restricted Access Files exclude personally identifiable information (PII), such as study participants’ names, dates of birth, and Social Security Numbers. In addition, Public Use Files contain data on program services and outcomes that have been transformed in various ways to preserve confidentiality — for example, by rounding dollar values to the nearest $100 and combining small categories into larger ones. Restricted Access Files preserve more of the original detail in the data.  However, access to these data is limited to researchers from recognized institutions and typically requires submission of a detailed application and data use plan that have been pre-approved by the researcher’s Institutional Review Board.

A full list of available MDRC evaluation Public Use and Restricted Access Files is available here.

Visit this page for more information about how to access MDRC Public Use and Restricted Access Files.