Item Response Warehouse

The Item Response Warehouse (IRW) is a collection of open, harmonized item response datasets.

  • Open: The data are licensed for reformatting and public reuse. Their provenance is documented and code used to transform original data to meet the IRW data standard is available.

  • Harmonized: The data are formatted to a common standard. The goal of the IRW is to make large quantities of data available for standardized analysis given the common formatting.

  • Item Response: The IRW is comprised of cross-classified item responses. The key element required of data for inclusion in the IRW is that the data need to report individual responses that are cross-classified by the focus of measurement (typically a person) and the measurement tool (typically an item).

These datasets in IRW span a wide range of measures; examples include measures of ability in education settings, measures of partisanship based on voting records, and personality measures based on survey questions. Responses can be scored in a variety of ways (dichotomous, polytomous, continuous) and may contain additional data (e.g., response time).

NOTE: The website may not reflect all data currently available in the IRW. To see the most recent set of available data resources, please look here.

Metadata

Examine sample sizes and other dataset summary statistics.

Individual datasets

Explore each dataset’s distribution of mean responses by item and subject.