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Quarterly Update

A message from Pew Research Center President Michael Dimock · Subscribe ↗

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How we choose what to study

Dear readers,

Happy RPP season! This is an exciting time of year for Pew Research Center as we are in the middle of our annual research planning process (RPP for short). This is when our research teams gather to discuss long-range planning and set our research priorities for the coming years. As part of this process, I recently invited you, our readers, to share your thoughts about our mission and the topics we study, as well as the accessibility of our work. I’m grateful for the many thoughtful responses and smart suggestions, which have been shared widely with our planning teams.

Since I’m often asked about how we choose the topics we study, I thought I would share a behind-the-scenes look at how this process works.

We aim for a balanced and diverse research agenda, sort of like an investment portfolio, that addresses near-term issues but also lays the groundwork for challenges we can anticipate three to five years out. Our planning is guided by several key questions we ask ourselves:

• What does the world need to better understand about individuals and societies? 
• Does the research inform important, and current, national and global policy debates? 
• Does the work address issues on the horizon that could reshape political, economic or personal lives in the future?

We also gravitate toward topics where we can add something unique to the conversation; if other organizations are covering A, B and C, we’ll put our energy into X, Y and Z. Our goal is to fill gaps in public knowledge, provide a shared foundation of facts, upend conventional wisdom, and encourage decision-makers to look at things afresh. We pursue work that links to the bigger themes and long-term trends we’ve been studying for decades – like political polarization, religious affiliation, family structures, technology adoption or the evolving news media landscape – so we can help people understand how attitudes and preferences have changed over time.

Finally, we prioritize research proposals that stretch our methodological toolkit. Our survey methods team has big ambitions for growing and improving the American Trends Panel, our nationally representative sample of survey-takers. A larger panel will allow us to better capture the diversity of views within smaller populations that other polling platforms can’t effectively represent. Meanwhile, our Data Labs team is using computational social science to answer gnarly questions in the world of data science. And because human beings don’t always distill down to numbers, our teams are increasingly incorporating qualitative data from open-ended questions, in-depth interviewing and focus groups to enrich and complement our statistical research.

With all this in mind, you can imagine that we generate far more ideas than the Center’s financial and intellectual resources can support. The most important – and the toughest – part of our research planning process is zeroing in on the best portfolio that brings facts to bear on the most pressing issues we’ve identified. We take this responsibility very seriously and are grateful to our funders, large and small, for putting their trust in us to make those judgments. As one reader shared in a reply to my last email, “I can only imagine how satisfying it must be to work in research with the resources and staff you have to do what you do.” It truly is a privilege.

My best wishes,

Michael Dimock
President, Pew Research Center