User Stories
Here is a growing list of user stories that will help you understand how various types of people take advantage of the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Each user story follows a typical format:
As a (user role), I want (goal), so that (benefit).
Select which User Story to view:
Undergraduate Student
Undergraduate User Story:
As a senior in a capstone course,
I want to find data I can use to write a paper,
so that I can generate statistics and use them in the paper as part of the assigned work.
Details
Topics/Search Terms:
- race relations
- high school students
Challenges:
-
My paper proposal is due on Monday, and I need to find a dataset I can analyze online without knowing a stats package.
Data needs:
- I need data that can speak to high school students’ attitudes about race and equality.
Goals
- Find publications linked to data that can be analyzed online.
- Examine publications to see what ICPSR study data were used by the authors to get at attitudes on race in high school.
Faculty Liaison Librarian
Faculty Liaison Librarian User Story:
As an academic librarian assisting a small group of faculty and grad assistants as they draft a proposal,
I want to compile articles that are linked to sentencing data, to determine which of the studies would be usable by the research team,
so that they can determine if public-use data will be sufficient to meet the needs of the team.
Details
Topics/Search Terms:
- sentencing disparities
- criminal justice
Challenges:
- Unaware of the availability of the breadth of public use data on sentencing disparities.
Data needs:
- Must be nationally representative.
Goals
- Get a good idea of the way a subset of relevant data are discussed and used in the literature.
- Prepare a report to the research group about the characteristics of data available to determine whether the team must apply for restricted data.
Graduate Student
Grad Student User Story:
As an early-career researcher,
I want to reduce the time/effort it takes to conduct a literature review and examine certain variables,
so that I can find the highest quality data for my needs
Details
Topics/Search Terms:
- India
- sanitation and child development
Challenges:
- Limited familiarity with the topic of interest.
- Limited resources and time for acquiring data, so looking for appropriate data for secondary use.
Data needs:
- Demographic data from India.
Goals
- Find useful data for my research question.
- Narrow my topic, based on the current state of the literature.
Grant Writer
Grant Writer User Story:
As a staff member at a community non-profit providing arts/cultural summer events,
I want to access published reports with summarized statistics describing community characteristics and interests,
so that I have enough supporting evidence when preparing a successful grant proposal for funding
Details
Topics/Search Terms:
- arts participation
- positive impacts of the arts
Challenges:
- Lack of enough resources (time, money, staff) to conduct surveys to estimate community's characteristics and interests.
- Lack of supporting evidence to prove potential positive outcome of the project.
Goals
- Be able to cite published summarized statistics that were derived from national surveys of participation in arts, time spent on arts, or the impact of arts and culture.
Instructor
Instructor User Story:
As a faculty member teaching an introductory graduate stats class,
I want to see publications using different modeling techniques in their titles,
so that I can direct my students to data-linked literature using those modeling techniques.
Details
Topics/Search Terms:
- Bayesian
- model
- Regression
Challenges:
- Limited time to search for example articles and track down the underlying data that were used for the modeling techniques in each.
Data needs:
- I want to limit search to certain data series I am very familiar with, which contain robust longitudinal data.
Goals
- Search within a series for publications containing words in their titles referring to various modeling or analysis techniques.