The Online College Social Life Survey was designed by Paula England and collected between Autumn 2005-Spring 2011 at twenty-one four-year colleges and universities in the United States. This page includes the questionnaire, data, an online codebook, and a list of articles which make use of these data. Contact England for questions about the survey and questionnaire, or Jonathan Bearak for questions about the codebook and source code. Researchers who wish to use OCSLS data should check with their University IRB before using it to see what they require. Often, school IRBs will assign research using the data exempt status given that it is anonymous secondary data.
Questionnaire
See this page for a copy of the questionnaire.
Data & Codebook
To download these data, see the data index. Choose from “text”, “R”, and “Stata” formats, from the links in the first row of the table (the row labeled “Datafiles.”). If hookups, dates, or relationships, are your unit of analysis, download the “hookups”, “dates”, or “romances” file. To analyze events within students, “append” or “rbind” these files, in Stata or R, respectively. To analyze students, download the “students” file. All of the events files have the student-level questions. The students file also contains all the event-level questions, but prefixed, “hookup..”, “date..”, or “romance..”. Variable names are shorter in Stata; see the “names” file, or the variable pages in the codebook, for the abbreviated variable names.
Browse the codebook by category, with a list of variables and their descriptions:
To construct these data and this codebook from scratch, download and execute this program in R:
setwd("/path/to/ocsls/")
source("Do_files/Recode_hookup_data.r")