The University of South Carolina (USC) is now an affiliate member of the Atlanta Research Data Center, which is a partnership between the U.S. Census Bureau and a consortium of universities.
Membership to the center provides USC faculty and students with access to restricted U.S. Census data and data from other restricted government-sponsored agencies. Among other benefits, this membership allows USC affiliates access to fine resolution data (e.g., on individuals, specific businesses or firms, and high geographical resolution), otherwise unavailable complete datasets and additional variables, and longitudinal data to track individuals over time (e.g., to examine how policies at birth affect adult outcomes).
Access to this level of data quality will result in interdisciplinary collaborations and in high impact research across the university. Data is available across many topics, including crime and criminal justice, housing, business and employment, health, economics, demographics, labor. For a complete list of accessible datasets, please visit the following FSRDC site. If you are interested in accessing restricted datasets, please contact Dr. Melissa Banzhaf at the Atlanta Research Data Center (melissa.r.banzhaf@census.gov). For more general information, please contact Dr. Leila Larson, Assistant Professor at the Arnold School of Public Health (larsonl@mailbox.sc.edu).
Below are some good sources for research ideas using RDC data. Please note that these sources do not include projects using restricted health (NCHS or AHRQ) data:
1. A list of CES Working Papers that mostly use restricted Census data can be found on the official CES website: https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/series/ces-wp.html. A more useful searchable version that allows search by topic key word or dataset name can be found here: https://ideas.repec.org/s/cen/wpaper.html.
2. There is also a spreadsheet with metadata on all current and past RDC projects using Census data, including the abstract: https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/fsrdc/about/ongoing-projects.html