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Abstract

Availability of data is a crucial problem in social sciences. It requires a series of factors: from inventories to technical tools to easy documentation. While diffusion of methodology and statistics classes, survey methods and data bases is con- tinuosly increasing in the social sciences, diffusion of data sharing and retrieval is less satisfying. The creation of Social Science Data Archives in the US and Europe since the mid ’60 is presented in the fist part of the article. They are institutions in charge of archiving and distributing data collected by academic, governmental or private actors.Then the focus moves to the Italian case, characterized by the lack of such a type of institution. The second part illustrates limits of social research in Italy caused by this fact.After stressing of the importance of secondary analysis in social sciences, two Italian data banks are presented, which have been created at the Istituto Superiore di Sociologia in Milan.The fist one is “Archivio Dati e Sondaggi Italiani e Internazionali”, a data bank of individual surveys since early ’70 to the present in the field of political behavior.The second one is “SISIFUS-Sistema di Indicatori Socioeconomici Informatizzati per lo studio dei Fenomeni Urbani e Socioambientali”, a data bank of aggregated data on Italian communes, provinces an regions, holding census, electoral and other socioeconomic data spanning over the postwar period.