Global Indicators 2015 Dataset (Cross-Sectional)

This is a small dataset of various global indicators developed for use in a course teaching research methods at the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi. The data is ready to be directly imported into SPSS, Stata, or other statistical packages. A brief codebook includes descriptions of each variable, the indicator's reference year(s), and links to the original sources. The data is cross-sectional, country-level data centered on 2015 as the primary reference year. Some data come from the most recent election or averages from a handful of years. The dataset includes socioeconomic and political data drawn from sources and indicators from the World Bank, the UNDP, and International IDEA. It also includes popular indexes (and some key components) from Freedom House, Polity IV, the Economist's Democracy Index, the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, and the Fund for Peace's Fragile States Index. The dataset also includes various types of data (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio), useful for pedagogical examples of how to handle statistical data.