Poster Presentation for the Annual Meetings of the American Association for Public Opinion Research

(AAPOR) May 2005

The Roper Center, University of Connecticut

• 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

Project Goals

• 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

Members of Partnership

• 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.

Roper Center Role in the Project

Historical and Contemporary ‘At-Risk’ Data Collections

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

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

Historical and Contemporary ‘At-Risk’ Data Collections

Other Targeted Collections

Internet polls: Knowledge Networks,

Harris Interactive

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State Polls: Minnesota,

Field Poll (California)

Historical and Contemporary ‘At-Risk’ Data Collections

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

Surveys by The United States Information Agency Surveys

The Roper Center’s Current Holdings of USIA Studies (by Decade)

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s

Surveys by The United States Information Agency Surveys

Surveys by National Opinion Research Center

Trail Identified to the Punch Cards 85

Surveys not archived at the Roper Center 246 NORC Surveys Archived at the Roper Center 220

“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 ForstromNational Opinion Research Center,

University of ChicagoPaper presented at the IASSIST Conference June, 2002.

“In Praise of Data Archives: Finding and Recovering the 1963 Kennedy Assassination Study”

Surveys by National Opinion Research Center

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.”