The PSID has tracked the same American families since 1968 across income,
health, housing, wealth, education, and depression. It’s one of the most
powerful public datasets in social science, but the raw files arrive with no
meaningful column names and require a codebook crosswalk just to understand
what you have.
PSID-SHELF (from U-Michigan) reorganized the data into 34 topic areas with
real variable names. There’s now a browser app built on top of it — search
across all 34 topics in plain English and see sample data immediately. No
download, no account, no setup. Link in comments.
There’s also a local track that produces 34 clean CSVs from your own SHELF
download, ready for pandas, R, or Excel.
Happy to answer questions.
submitted by /u/Snoo752
[link] [comments]
