The Pew Internet Project is non-profit and non-partisan and one of the ways we try to act in the public interest and to be as transparent as possible is to share our survey data with the world — for free.

Usually 6-8 months after we issue reports about our surveys findings, we post our the raw data sets, our questionnaires, and some easy-to-read crosstabulation files in Word-readable format so that interested scholars, other researchers, technologists, marketing analysts, and others can do their own customized analysis of the material we have gathered.

Hundreds of people have downloaded these survey files and many have published material built around the data.

We have recently added three new data sets to the stockpile of more than 40 data files we have posted from our work that began in a survey in March 2000. You can see those new data files here. They include the surveys we conducted last year about how people used the internet during the election campaign, the rise of blogs and blog readership, and how people use the internet in their daily lives. People can browse around all the data sets we have shared by clicking on the links on that page.

The most sophisticated kind of data analysis requires special software, so we urge people to contact us at data@pewresearch.org/internet if they are not familiar with using software like SPSS or SAS.

Another way to learn from our on-going survey work is to examine our regular statistical updates about life online that can be found:

And you can click on a massive spreadsheet of our data that will allow you to see internet adoption and usage trends over time by clicking on the “Usage over Time” link on this page.