Mission

These are exciting times for survey research. Never before has so much survey research been done, and never before has it had so much impact on academic scholarship, government policy-making, and business decision-making.

The uses of surveys today are numerous. Surveys allow governments to track quality of life in their countries and regions and to target intervention efforts to help people most effectively. They give a democratic electorate a voice in between elections, to express political desires in real time and to influence the actions of political leaders. They are important means for businesses to meet the needs of consumers efficiently and affordably. More than $20 billion is now spent each year conducting surveys in the United States alone, and terrifically important statistics such as the unemployment and inflation rates are derived from them.

As the use of surveys has expanded, so too has the need to strengthen the methods by which they are designed, administered, and analyzed. The speed and low cost of online data collection have also encouraged the widespread use of convenience and volunteer samples that may not accurately represent the populations researchers seek to describe. Questionnaire design is still treated by most practitioners as an art that anyone can do instinctively, rather than as a science with guidelines for optimization. And when survey evidence is attacked in public debate, no coordinated voices answer the critics by documenting the accuracy and value of surveys.

Leadership is needed, and the Stanford Institute for Excellence in Survey Research was created within the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences to provide it. SIESR does not provide data collection services; numerous commercial and nonprofit firms already do that well. Instead, we monitor the conduct of surveys around the world, identify the most pressing challenges facing the enterprise, consolidate insight about how to manage those challenges, lay out research agendas for the field to address them, publicize the findings of important research, and bring scholars and practitioners together across disparate sectors.

Why Stanford? Stanford's faculty includes a broad array of talent and experience in designing and conducting survey research, in Political Science, Communication, Sociology, Psychology, the Law School, the Graduate School of Business, the Medical School, the School of Education, and other departments. Included on the faculty are scholars who pioneered the embedding of experiments in surveys and who have led innovations in understanding how to optimize survey measurement. Taken together, this breadth of expertise makes Stanford exceptionally well positioned to lead an interdisciplinary effort to advance survey research.