A number of government agencies, research institutes, and universities make their data available to the public on-line. This page is designed to expose you to the available avenues for accessing on-line data for economic research and social science research more broadly.
If you Google your topic with the term "statistics" or "data" it is unlikely to produce results that offer you good data. However, within your results, you may find citations for original data sets.
To increase your odds of finding useful citations, try searching for your topic using Google Scholar and Google News. In your results, take notice of which institutions collect the data that interest you. Find those institutions via Google or using the resources below:
Journalists and social commentators are increasingly using infographs and data visualization to express trends, relationships, and to make sense of the abundance of available data. Infographics are familiar visual representations and illustrations of single variables measured across time or location. Data visualizations often express more complex relationships within larger data sets. Some of the best data visualizations allow users to interact with the visualization in order to ask their own questions of the data.
The list of links below directs you to some of the best infographs and data visualizations on the web. Explore these to generate ideas for your research.