Access to Data for Research

The Windsor Research Data Centre, located on the first floor of the Leddy Library, is a combination of a secure Statistics Canada office on the University of Windsor campus and a statistical analysis computing laboratory. It is a branch of the UWO Research Data Centre.

Windsor area researchers now have local access to confidential microdata from Statistics Canada's population and household surveys, including a number of major longitudinal surveys that track the responses of individuals over a period of time and offer a richer source for analyzing social issues than do the traditional, more limited, cross-sectional surveys.

The importance of this data to researchers, particularly in the social sciences and health disciplines, cannot be overstated. Until now, University of Windsor researchers who needed to use this data had to travel to the nearest centre at the University of Western Ontario in London. Now Windsor faculty will have the same direct access to this important resource as faculty at Canada's largest research institutions.

The Windsor Research Data Centre is a part of the Academic Data Centre, so researchers using the RDC will have access to the same one-on-one support with software and statistical methods that we already provide.