Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

2008

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    A Portrait of American Catholics on the Eve of Pope Benedict’s Visit to the U.S.

    When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States on April 15, he will find a Catholic Church that is undergoing rapid ethnic and demographic changes, and whose flock is quite diverse both in their religious practices and levels of commitment, as well as in their social and political views. And, as this portrait of […]

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    Digital Footprints

    In the era of Web 2.0, individuals and organizations have gone beyond simply being findable to being intimately knowable. These digital footprints are blazing trails and stirring up issues about how we manage our own online identities and those of…

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    Why News of Iraq Dropped

    The tactical success of the surge and the tactical failures of the new Democratic Congress are among the reasons why the five-year-old conflict seems to have disappeared from the headlines. And then there are the competing demands of covering the most intriguing presidential campaign in recent memory.

  • short reads

    Awareness of Iraq War Fatalities Plummets

    Shortly before the count of U.S. military fatalities reached 4,000, a Pew survey found that only 28% of U.S. adults were able to correctly specify the approximate number of Americans who have died in the Iraq war, far fewer than the number able to estimate troop deaths correctly in earlier surveys.

  • short reads

    Americans Fed Up with Having a Country

    Nearly nine out of 10 Americans (86%) are “tired of having a country;” frequently cited reasons include a lack of significant results from the democratic process (36%) dissatisfaction with customer service (28%), and exhaustion (22%), as reported by The Onion.

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    The Pastor, The Candidate, And The Speech Lead The News

    John McCain and Hillary Clinton were reduced to relative obscurity last week. The media’s presidential campaign narrative instead focused on one overarching issue: could Barack Obama handle the controversy over his pastor’s racially inflammatory remarks?

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    Fewer Voters Identify as Republicans

    The balance of party identification in the U.S. electorate now favors the Democratic Party by a decidedly larger margin than in either of the two previous presidential election cycles including in some key swing states.