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Project Goals

Poster Presentation for the Annual Meetings of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) May 2005 The Roper Center, University of Connecticut. Project Goals.

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Project Goals

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  1. Poster Presentation for the Annual Meetings of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) May 2005 The Roper Center, University of Connecticut

  2. Project Goals • As part of the Library of Congress’ desire to develop a national strategy to collect, archive and preserve the growing amounts of digital materials for current and future generations, the Data-PASS partnership seeks to: • Identify important public and private research studies in the social sciences that may be ‘at-risk’ of being lost to the research community • Acquire data files, methodological information and appropriate documentation for the studies • Preserve and process studies using current archival standards • Develop strategies for ensuring that the data remain available to future generations of researchers

  3. Members of Partnership • ICPSR, University of Michigan • Roper Center, University of Connecticut • Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina • Murray Research Center of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University • Virtual Data Center, Harvard-MIT Data Center and Harvard University Library • National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) • Library of Congress

  4. Roper Center Role in the Project • Partner with National Opinion Research Center to fill gaps in archived collections of NORC surveys (1941-present) • Work with NARA and the US State Department to identifying United States Information Agency (USIA) surveys not in the archives and assessing their readiness for data processing and archiving (1953-1999) • Determine the availability for archiving of those surveys that have questions in the iPOLL database* but are not represented by datasets in the archives Note: *The iPOLL Databank – The Roper Center’s public opinion survey database of nearly one-half million questions from 1935 to the present found at http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.

  5. Historical and Contemporary ‘At-Risk’ Data Collections

  6. Survey Research Gems to be Rescued The 1945 Survey on class consciousness by the Research Council reported in Richard Centers's classic The Psychology of Social Classes. Religion and the American People, 1952. Conducted by Ben Gaffin Assoc. 1981 Religion Study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate and the Gallup Organization A Clark, Martire, and Bartolomeo Economics and Work survey done for Fortune Magazine in 1990. NBC News Race Relations Poll, June 1995. 1990 Study on the views of rich and poor people by the Gallup Organization. Phi Delta Kappa National Education Studies from 1974, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1997-2003 by the Gallup Organization The 1993 Family Circle Family Index Project by PSRAI.  Family issues, feelings about community and neighbors, recent experiences. Gallup Social Audits Surveys (1990s to present) National Annenberg Election Study

  7. Historical and Contemporary ‘At-Risk’ Data Collections • Targeted Collections • Associated Press and Ipsos-Public Affairs • Battleground Polls • Cambridge Reports, 1974-1995 • Democracy Corps • Fox News • Marist College Institute for Public Opinion • Opinion Research Corporation • Pew Internet and American Life surveys • Program on International Policy Attitudes • (PIPA, at the University of Maryland) • Quinnipiac University Polling Institute • Roper Public Affairs • TIPP/Investor's Business Daily, Christian Science Monitor

  8. Historical and Contemporary ‘At-Risk’ Data Collections Other Targeted Collections Internet polls: Knowledge Networks, Harris Interactive *********************************** State Polls: Minnesota, Field Poll (California)

  9. Surveys by The United States Information Agency Surveys The USIA Data Archived by the Roper Center and The National Archives Represent Less Than Half of the Total Number of Surveys Conducted. Estimated Total Number of Studies 4,000 NARA 1,315 Roper Center 547

  10. Surveys by The United States Information Agency Surveys The Roper Center’s Current Holdings of USIA Studies (by Decade)

  11. Surveys by The United States Information Agency Surveys

  12. Surveys by National Opinion Research Center “Survey data must be sent to survey archives like the Roper Center and ICPSR where the documentation and data will be preserved, backed-up, periodically updated as technologies change, indexed, and made routinely and easily accessible to researchers. Failure to archive studies is poor science and a disservice to other contemporary researchers and those in the future.” Tom Smith & Michael Forstrom National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago Paper presented at the IASSIST Conference June, 2002. “In Praise of Data Archives: Finding and Recovering the 1963 Kennedy Assassination Study” NORC Surveys Archived at the Roper Center 220 Surveys not archived at the Roper Center 246 Trail Identified to the Punch Cards 85

  13. One Example of the “Data Rescue” Process Just after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Tom Smith was reminded of the study NORC completed just after another American tragedy, the John F. Kennedy assassination. He remembered the detailed questions gauging how Americans were coping in 1963 and wondered how those strategies compared to this current situation. He and his colleagues set out to replicate these questions in the National Tragedy Study in 2001. The problem was that the study had never been archived. If Tom had not worked with these data in the mid-1970s, they would have remained a hidden treasure; no finding aids pointed researchers to this valuable dataset. With a hearty dose of luck and a Herculean-effort on the part of Tom and his associates, they managed to uncover the study—10 boxes of 38 year-old punched cards! The steps leading up to that discovery and those that followed to make the dataset usable are a lesson in the value of archiving data! Smith and Forstrom concluded “…it took persistent efforts, the assistance of two ex-employees, and a bit of serendipity to unearth the data. Moreover, once recovered we had data on a medium that was so antiquated that it took four months of extensive efforts to convert it to a modern, user-friendly format.” Surveys by National Opinion Research Center

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