BIO
CONTRIBUTION
For over eight decades, said the committee, “NORC at the University of Chicago has stood at the vanguard of social science research, pioneering methodological innovation and building data infrastructure that have fundamentally reshaped how we understand public opinion and society at large. Founded in 1941, its enduring contributions include the General Social Survey (GSS), now widely regarded as the gold standard for measuring and tracking attitudes, values and social change.”
In the 1930s, Harry Field – a Briton living in the United States who worked for the private survey firm Young & Rubicam, under the guidance of polling pioneer George Gallup – realized that the results of these studies, which were frequently reported in the newspapers, could be distorted to align with clients’ political biases. This convinced him of the need to establish a nonprofit public opinion organization that would conduct research on a public service basis, in the interest of safeguarding democracy.
During the convulsive period following the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Field amassed sufficient funds to establish NORC (originally the National Opinion Research Center) in 1941, with its initial base at the University of Denver, Colorado. That same year, the U.S. entered the war, an event that would serve as a launchpad for NORC, charged by the Government with the bulk of the surveys examining Americans’ views on the conflict, with a particular focus on trust, attitudes and behaviors.
Field was convinced that rigorous data collection – seeking to minimize sources of error in social measurements – was the key to the reliability of survey results. Despite his untimely death in 1946, he laid the foundation for the NORC philosophy, which puts innovation and methodological research at the heart of every project. His successor as director, Clyde Hart, carried on his work and, in 1947, oversaw the center’s move to the University of Chicago, a relationship that continues to this day.
The General Social Survey: a benchmark in the measurement of social change
From its first surveys NORC showed a commitment to measuring complex issues in American society, like attitudes towards black people or the presence of women in the workforce, later expanding its interest to other topics including civil liberties, the cost of healthcare, and fear of war. It was to standardize all this data, enable comparisons over time, and spot societal trends that NORC launched the General Social Survey (GSS) in 1972.
This large-scale survey on the attitudes and behaviors of the U.S. population was conducted almost every year until 1994, when it became biennial. Today, the GSS is the second most cited source in academic social science publications, second only to the U.S. Census, and its data have been the basis for more than 27,000 articles, books, reports, and PhD dissertations.
Since its inception, it has kept up its methodological consistency while continuing to adapt to new social realities. As a result, it has identified more than 1,000 trends in such diverse areas as civil liberties, race relations, trust in institutions, social mobility, religion, consumption patterns, and, more recently, abortion, feelings towards animals, and isolationism.
NORC’s drive toward data standardization spurred the expansion of the survey beyond the borders of the United States. In 1982, Tom Smith, then director of the GSS, launched an international pilot project in partnership with Germany’s ZUMA research institute (now known as GESIS). Each organization dedicated a small section of their respective national surveys (GSS and ALLBUS) to asking the same questions. The success of the initiative led to the creation of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in 1984, with the U.S. and Germany joined that same year by Australia and the United Kingdom. Today, it involves more than 40 countries, spanning every continent.
NORC has also led innovations in survey methodology by refining sampling methods, advancing different aspects of questionnaire design, and addressing the problem of declining response rates.
To minimize measurement error, questionnaires are designed to factor the so-called context effect (the order of questions can radically change the response). Also, experiments have been run that involve splitting the sample in two with each half containing different versions of a given wording, or examining the effects of including or omitting intermediate categories or scores in the response options (split-ballot experiments), as a way to determine which version is more neutral.
A huge amount of care also goes into selecting the words used in questionnaires to avoid linguistic connotations that might influence answers (for instance, asking about “social welfare spending” is not the same as asking about “assistance for the most disadvantaged”).
NORC has also dealt with the problem of low response rates by training its interviewers in “conversion” techniques, providing them with scripted comebacks to common refusal arguments (e.g., I don’t have time) without being intrusive. It has researched into the use of incentives and which work best, concluding that even small prepaid incentives (cash provided at the time of initial contact) significantly increase response rates without significantly affecting the quality of the data collected. And it has designed versions of the GSS (initially conducted in person, face-to-face) that support web and phone responses, so individuals within the sample can respond at their convenience.
The organization, finally, has been a leader in democratizing access to its data. One milestone here was the 2015 launch of the GSS Data Explorer, which has since made the data from these surveys available via open access.
