ANN ARBOR—A new online Minority Data Resource Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research provides easy analysis of a wide range of topics related to racial and ethnic minority populations in the U.S.

Topics range from comparative data on crime, education, health and political opinions to how emergency waiting room times, rates of capital punishment, and substance use vary by race and ethnic origin.

According to historian Myron P. Gutmann, director of the ISR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the new resource center is designed to be a resource for teachers as well as researchers.

“Our holdings and the way we provide access to them usually favor sophisticated users,” said sociologist Felicia LeClere, who developed the new archive in collaboration with a team of ICPSR staff. “This is a more user-friendly gateway that includes new tools to help with online analysis. We also feature findings and data sets on a rotating basis to encourage users to go into the site.”

One of the recent featured findings used a simple bar chart to show emergency room waiting time for different ethnic groups.

The graph illustrates racial and ethnic differences in the mean waiting times to see attending physicians in U.S. emergency rooms in 2004. Blacks wait on average 254 minutes or 4-1/4 hours to see a physician once they register at the admitting desk. This is longer than any other racial group listed by between 1/2 and 2-1/2 hours. The data for this graph come from the 2004 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS).

Access to the new online archive is available at www.icpsr.umich.edu/MDRC to anyone affiliated with hundreds of member universities or institutions.

Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the world’s oldest survey research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest computerized social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information.

MDRC membersChart: emergency room waiting time for different ethnic groups (Excel file)