Build and Broaden: Strengthening Social Science Research Infrastructure at the University

Social science research is limited by a lack of high-quality data about public opinion on numerous minority populations. This lack of high-quality data is often due to a lack of social science research infrastructure. This lack of infrastructure is related to crippling debt, consecutive years of catastrophic natural disasters, rapid population loss, and limited access to support from the national government.

This project is a collaboration between an established institution in survey research and a MSI to strengthen social science research infrastructure at the MSI and to improve infrastructure for measuring and analyzing public opinion about an underserved and understudied minority population. The project builds infrastructure that will aide in the production of academic research in and on a minority population and will provide a voice, through opinion polling, to the heretofore understudied population.

In addition, the survey infrastructure established will provide University affiliates at the MSI with access to a much-needed research tool to advance their scholarship.

This project will initiate a new, long-term collaboration between the MSI and the University of Michigan to collect, organize, and disseminate data on public opinion, political behavior, and political institutions of an underserved population. The goals of this partnership are to: (1) provide the MSI's faculty with high-quality tools to support and advance their research agendas; (2) provide both undergraduate and graduate students at the MSI with research opportunities and training; (3) provide researchers at academic, governmental, and nonprofit institutions with high-quality data that advances research on the population of interest; and (4) provide a scientifically validated vehicle to accurately capture the political, economic, and social preferences and experiences of members of the understudied population.

At the end of this first phase of this collaboration, the team expects to have the following in place: a survey design; a sampling framework; a data collection plan that maximizes the representative nature of the survey while minimizing costs; a plan to ensure the financial and logistical sustainability of the infrastructure; quality control checks; and a plan to disseminate and archive the data in a way that supports local institutions and researchers. By building infrastructure to collect, organize, and disseminate data on public opinion and other political dynamics, this collaboration will create many new possibilities to support the research of the MSI's students and faculty.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.