Survey center has big impact

The small house at 1800 University Ave., dwarfed by the taller buildings nearby, eludes the attention of students who cut across its leaf-sprinkled front lawn on their way to class. A tattered piece of paper on the front door directs visitors to the rear, offering no clue of the building’s occupants — or purpose.

As home to the main offices of the UW Survey Center, a department in the College of Letters and Science, the house’s deceptively simple façade masks a rich interior of research, information and innovation. Since its inception in 1987, the center has served the survey research needs of the campus community, as well as federal, state and local government, and nonprofit agencies, providing high-quality social science data while quietly working its way to the forefront of survey research.

The center routinely collects influential data, from UW student satisfaction reports used to evaluate university operations, to poverty and welfare findings, which are fed into policy assessments and development. In addition to more than doubling in size during its 14 years, the center has seen its endeavors grow from a few projects per year to nearly 60, with a noted increase in the diversity and complexity of its undertakings.

“This university has a remarkable social science presence. The social science departments are of extraordinary high quality, and survey research is a really basic mode of research for a lot of social sciences, so it seemed like it would be a good idea if we had a survey research operation on this campus,” says professor emeritus Jim Sweet, founder and faculty director.

Sweet cites the facilitation of faculty and graduate student research using survey methods, as well as the provision of a training ground for survey research as the primary factors behind the center’s creation.

For the center’s inaugural project, Sweet and his then-small staff implemented the Continuous National Survey in early 1988, which remains an important part of the center’s operations today.

The survey provides a continuous stream of data by conducting telephone interviews each day with a national sample of individuals. It contains both core questions and additional content that changes periodically, allowing researchers to tailor the survey to their specific research needs. It has been used by researchers for a wide range of purposes, including tracking political opinion and studying how people deal with uncertainty in decision-making.

Sweet says the survey has routinely contributed data and findings with important national implications to many different research publications. It remains one of the center’s flagship studies.

“It’s a resource used in many different ways by many different people, and it’s quite an innovative idea that other researchers at other places have begun to emulate,” Sweet says.

A UW faculty member since 1967, Sweet is familiar with groundbreaking research studies and methods. His interest in family demography led to the creation of the National Survey of Families and Households in 1985, the first of its kind for its exclusive study of American family life. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, 13,000 people nationwide were first interviewed in 1987. The academic research project is now in its third final stage of interviewing a sample that has grown to nearly 18,000 respondents in 14 years.

Findings will aid in understanding the diversity of the American family life experience across a wide variety of subgroups of society, Sweet says.

“We have no control or knowledge of what people are using the data for today other than journal articles or when we read something in the newspaper about it,” Sweet says. “Increasingly, there are studies that have taken off from what we’ve done, and measures have been replicated, reproduced and adapted.”

The success of the projects and research conducted by the center has come largely as a result of the dedication of its staff and its extensive capabilities, according to John Stevenson, associate director of the center. The center benefits from working with UW, especially through its collaboration with the sociology department.

“There are just a slew of world-class researchers here. We get to learn from the best and work with the best,” he says.

Stevenson also credits innovative technology and methodology. A recent study dealing with welfare and women and children presented several challenges in terms of collecting data, but the center was able to record an 82 percent response rate because of the extensive tracking and research tactics used, Stevenson says.

“You’re really talking about trying to gather information about complex human beings’ lives,” he says. “You’re trying to gather it through the tool of a single question to be understood by everyone the same way.”