SCLA 102: Transformative Texts, Critical Thinking and Communication II: Modern World

You are going to want to provide a range of high-quality evidence to support your persuasive presentation. Data and statistics can provide very useful, concrete information to contextualize a problem over time, make comparisons, pin point a significant event that influenced change in the data, and more.

This is not a comprehensive list of all the places you can look to for data or statistics related to your topic. For more options, consider which government agency would most likely collect information about your topic, and visit their official website. 

There are tons of agencies and organizations that gather and make data freely available. When you are searching for data via a Google search, make sure to investigate what the organization or agency does to make sure you can trust the data they provide. Take a look at their "About" or "Mission" page to learn more about them, especially if you have not heard of an organization. Don't hesitate to go outside of the organization's website either! We can learn a lot about what others say about the organization/publisher/etc. to figure this out.

Tip: Relying on the website domain (i.e. .edu, .gov, .org) is usually not the most helpful way to determine credibility. You still will need to dig a bit deeper (often by going to other sources) to determine what the organization does, what their mission is, how they collect their data, and more.