Summer Program

From the beginning, the founders of ICPSR believed a training component was a necessary part of the organization in order to teach researchers how to use the newly available data the consortium was providing.

The first Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research was held in 1963, and was attended by 21 faculty members and 41 graduate students from member institutions, according to the Summer Program section of the 1963-1964 ICPSR Annual Report (pdf). The program offered nine courses, with the most popular class, “Proseminar in Behavior Research Methods,” attracting 46 participants.

The next six decades of the program in many ways mirrored the growth of ICPSR as a whole — participation grew, the offerings became more diverse, and the program established itself as one of the top training centers for social scientists in the world. In addition to offering dozens of courses on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, the Summer Program expanded to offer courses in several cities across the United States and around the world. Thanks to support from ICPSR, the Institute for Social Research, Rackham Graduate School, and other organizations, scholarship support increased, too, with more than 80 scholars receiving financial assistance every summer.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the Summer Program faced a staggering challenge: Convert its full curriculum -more than 80 courses- from in-person to online training. Thanks to the hard work and ingenuity of its administrative and instructional staff, the 2020 Summer Program welcomed over 1,600 virtual scholars from dozens of time zones.