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Oct. 17, 2005

NSF awards $7.6 million for ISR National Election Studies

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---The National Science Foundation has awarded $7.6 million to fund the American National Election Studies (ANES), conducted by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) since 1952, through the year 2009.

The new grant includes some significant changes in the long-term, internationally emulated study, considered the gold standard in understanding political attitudes and electoral behavior. These include a partnership with Stanford University and a series of methodological innovations that will make the study more powerful and more democratic.

"This award allows us to continue the project in new and better ways than ever before," said Arthur Lupia, a research professor at the ISR and principal investigator of the new grant with Stanford political scientist Jon Krosnick. "We are excited to have Stanford at the helm of the study with us, bringing valuable new expertise in survey design and measurement."

"NSF's ringing endorsement of the project is a wonderful recognition of 50 years of important scholarship by hundreds of social scientists studying elections and will equip them superbly to continue this important work," Krosnick said.

By asking the same questions for more than half a century, before and after each presidential election, the ANES allows analysts to identify trends in public opinion that are not apparent in snapshot surveys and polls.

Under the new grant, the ANES will also re-interview a panel of the same participants more than half a dozen times in order to explore the causes and consequences of voting behavior and electoral outcomes. This panel design will provide insight into how election-year politics, including campaign ads, affect citizen judgments of candidates and of a new administration in the formative months of its term.

In addition to helping Americans understand how democracy works, the study will itself become more diverse and democratic in organization and management, according to Krosnick and Lupia. Starting in January 2006, on online commons will be up and running, allowing faculty members and graduate students from around the nation to propose new questions for the study, and comment on the proposals of others. "The online commons will provide a forum for scholars to vet their ideas and to provide and receive feedback," Lupia said.

The ANES will also incorporate evolving communication technologies that have changed survey interviewing over the last few years. In their face-to-face interviews with respondents, interviewers will use the latest computer-assisted personal interviewing techniques, presenting respondents with visual stimuli, including photographs of politicians and videos of campaign ads.

According to Krosnick and Lupia, this approach will allow the study team to use measurement tools that have been refined in laboratories but rarely administered to representative national samples of adults. One of these tools is reaction time measurement, designed to elucidate the non-conscious, automatic processes that inform much thinking and behavior.

"Asking people to explain their thinking yields mostly blind guesses rather than genuine self-insight," Lupia said. "By combining self-reports that measure explicit attitudes and response latency that measures implicit attitudes, we can arrive at a better understanding of sensitive issues including prejudice and stereotyping."

Another innovative technique for measuring sensitive phenomena is audio computer-assisted self-interviewing. Respondents read a sensitive question on the laptop screen and hear the question asked through headphones, then enter their answers directly into the computer. The technique enhances accuracy in reporting sensitive issues and also overcomes literacy limitations.

Established in 1948, the Institute for Social Research (ISR) is among the world's oldest survey research organizations, and a world leader in the development and application of social science methodology. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Survey of Consumer Attitudes, the National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world's largest computerized social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at www.isr.umich.edu for more information.

RELATED LINKS:

ISR

Lupia Homepage

Krosnick Homepage

NES Homepage

Contact: Laura Lessnau
Phone: (734) 647-1851

Contact: Diane Swanbrow
Phone: (734) 647-9069