Where can I find good publicly available data that I could use to teach z-scores to my college students?

Question

I am sick of using the examples in the book. Is there an easy place to find data for which z-score/percentile/normal distribution stuff would be easy to see?

Answer 1

You may wish to read answers to this existing question on freely available datasets.

In general, I imagine that you'd want a dataset with some interesting metric variables. In psychology research methods classes that I've taught, we've often looked at datasets with intelligence or personality test scores.

If you want a personality example, I have some personality data and metadata on github based on the IPIP, an public domain measure of the Big 5 factors of personality.

• github repository home
• data
• metadata
• David Smith's summary

Answer 2

One good website where you can find data for different disciplines.

Rob Hyndman's Time Series Data library