Quarterly Update
A message from Pew Research Center President Michael Dimock · Subscribe ↗
Dear readers,
A few years ago, we launched a donate button on our website to enable readers to support our work by contributing to our parent organization, The Pew Charitable Trusts. We weren’t sure what to expect, but you have been very generous. I can’t tell you how much these gifts have meant to our staff as an expression of the value of our work.
So how have we been investing these donations? In our very “Pew-like” way, the answer is a bit technical: We’ve decided to strengthen our National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) to make our work even more rigorous and transparent.
What is NPORS? I’m glad you asked!
About five years ago, Pew Research Center moved virtually all of our U.S. survey work online, which has a host of benefits in terms of reliability and accuracy. With this approach, we randomly sample households across America, recruiting people to join the American Trends Panel (ATP). Surveys conducted on the ATP are weighted to national benchmarks to ensure each poll has the right balance of the population in terms of age, education, race and ethnicity, gender and other “parameters” we can find from reliable sources like the U.S. census.
Unfortunately, these sources don’t cover all of the variables that help make a survey representative. In particular, we’ve found that getting rigorous measures of characteristics like party identification, technology use and religious practices are just as important to ensure that every survey we conduct includes the most accurate balance of the public as possible.
We developed NPORS to address those shortcomings. NPORS is an annual survey of U.S. adults that is conducted by mail and designed to gather key missing information on which our ATP surveys can be grounded. It’s different from our ATP surveys because it is designed to get the highest response rate possible by asking fewer questions, following up with those who are slow to respond, and allowing people to reply online, by phone or by mail.
It’s an expensive endeavor, but going this extra mile gives us even more confidence that the survey data we share is as balanced and inclusive of all segments of America as possible. And to serve as a resource for the entire polling community, we make all the information we collect from NPORS freely available to other survey practitioners and scholars.
We know people are flooded with data these days and that it’s increasingly hard for consumers to discern the intent and quality of that data. At Pew Research Center, we strive to earn our readers’ trust. Thanks to the donors who made gifts to support our work through the donate button, we’re able to make core investments like NPORS to ensure we’re living up to the highest standards possible.
With my deepest gratitude,
Michael Dimock
President, Pew Research Center
A deeper look at Black Americans
A year ago, we shared we would be doing more to explore the diversity of perspectives and experiences within racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Three recent reports represent the culmination of some of our work surveying the attitudes of Black Americans, from their views of Black identity to their experiences with science.
An updated census of reporters at U.S. statehouses
We have updated and expanded our 2014 study that provides data on the number of journalists covering state capitols across the U.S. Our researchers spent roughly six months creating a census of the nation’s statehouse reporting pool, conducting qualitative interviews with two dozen statehouse reporters and other stakeholders, and (for the first time) studying reporters covering tribal governments in Native American communities.
What Americans think about artificial intelligence and human enhancement
Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and human enhancement technologies have the potential to remake American society in the coming decades. Our new survey explores public views of six developments that are widely discussed among futurists, ethicists and policy advocates. The first three technologies are part of the burgeoning array of AI applications, while the second three raise the possibility of dramatic changes to human abilities in the future.
