The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences has gone in this 18th edition to the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago for “their long-term contribution to the objective measurement of public opinion and social life,” in the words of the committee. They are recognized as having created “a reliable and unsurpassed source for social scientists, policymakers, and journalists” through their extensive data series built up over eight decades of research.
The two centers are global leaders in social science, united by their commitment to developing analyses based on robust and reliable data – lodged in long time series – concerning the principal aspects of social life. They are also home to many of the methodological and statistical innovations that have transformed survey techniques.
NORC’s General Social Survey catalogues multiple facets of social life, while the ISR puts a certain accent on political culture. Both share a focus on providing reliable data to three groups – social analysts, the media and policy makers – and offering advanced training to the new generations of social scientists.
The award goes to two institutions “that have shaped public opinion measurement both in the United States and worldwide,” in the words of committee chair Dolores Albarracín, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a past Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in the Social Sciences: “This award is testimony to the fact that if social science advances it is thanks to the support of the universities and science-funding bodies. The data provided by the ISR and NORC have been instrumental in revealing changing patterns of beliefs and shifts in the social and political climate, as well as in clarifying the dynamics of public trust – trust in society, government, institutions and the media.”
Both the ISR and NORC “are held in exceptionally high regard for the quality of their work in documenting social realities, not only in the United States but around the world, through the many students who have been trained at their centers,” adds committee member José Ramón Montero, Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. “Conducting a survey nowadays is a task fraught with difficulties: from the construction of questionnaires, to sample selection, the application of the survey and final analysis of the results.”
The efforts of the awardee organizations have yielded novel methodological tools for measuring and analyzing public attitudes in contemporary societies. And they have also led the design and implementation of transnational surveys, providing robust data that can serve as a reference for numerous social actors and institutions. At a time of social polarization and attacks on objectivity and truth, this award stands as a defense of rationality grounded in knowledge and scientific evidence.
Measuring how citizens think and feel from one election to another
Public opinion research is a multidisciplinary field that brings together sociology, political science, psychology, communication studies and statistics to identify, measure and analyze attitudes, values and social behaviors.
The methodological advances in survey theory led by the awardee organizations have enabled the reliable measurement of public opinion, a vital component of our democratic societies. The tools they developed provide insight into the perceptions and attitudes of society as a whole – not just those of the elite – and, through their reporting in the media, contribute to the phenomenon known as “citizenship between elections” giving individuals a “voice.”
Their contributions allow us to analyze evolving societal attitudes and behaviors through longitudinal studies that track social changes over time, as well as to provide detailed snapshots of public opinion on specific issues at a given moment, offering valuable insights to experts and media analysts.
The surveys conducted by NORC and the ISR reveal patterns of stability and change in public opinion, distinguishing between more stable, underlying attitudes and more volatile, shifting opinions. They have also made fundamental contributions to sample and questionnaire design, interview methodology and data interpretation.
The ISR at Michigan: milestones in attitudes measurement and survey methodology
The Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan stands as a global leader in empirically grounded social science,” said the committee in its citation. “Since its founding in 1949, ISR has transformed how researchers and policymakers understand human behavior, social change, and population dynamics. Based on methodological innovation and public relevance, ISR is home to landmark studies that have shaped public policy […]. “As the steward of one of the largest social science data archives, ISR exemplifies the highest standards of social science in service of society.”
For eight decades now, ISR’s work has been anchored on the three core principles of methodological depth, longitudinal depth and public impact. These guiding tenets have led to the development of groundbreaking studies that have advanced the social sciences, while at the same time informing evidence-based public policy decisions.
The organization traces its origins to the 1946 founding of the Social Research Center or SRC, brainchild of the social psychologist Rensis Likert and a group of fellow scholars whose aim was to enshrine public opinion research as a scientific discipline within the academic community.
The Second World War period saw a growing interest in scientific methods applied to social research that would end up playing a decisive role in the birth of the IRS. Likert’s wartime experience in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Program Surveys had shown the potential of using probabilistic sampling and standardized interviews to measure attitudes and behaviors on a large scale, and would serve as a template for the institutional model later implemented at the University of Michigan. In 1949, the SRC merged with the Research Center for Group Dynamics, founded at MIT by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin, to form the Institute for Social Research.
In its early years, the ISR helped refine the accuracy of measuring attitudes or predispositions (favorable or unfavorable) toward social groups, institutions, behaviors, and public policies through the development and dissemination of the so-called Likert scale (named after its creator, the center’s founder and first director), which enabled researchers to capture the intensity and structure of feelings.
As of the 1948 presidential elections, it began analyzing voters’ preferences through the Michigan Election Studies, alone in predicting the right outcome on the strength of its groundbreaking methodology (while most polls gave candidate Thomas Dewey a landslide victory, the ISR called it for the eventual winner, Harry Truman). This early success made the ISR sampling model a benchmark for political surveys in the United States.
Towards a better understanding of electoral processes and democratic engagement
The Michigan Election Studies were the precursor to the American National Election Studies (ANES) launched by the ISR in 1977. Through its Center for Political Studies (CPR), the ISR conducts national surveys and provides data on electoral behavior, public opinion, and political participation. This rich dataset has been fundamental in advancing the scientific understanding of electoral processes and democratic participation worldwide.
Another of the ISR’s signature projects is the World Values Survey (WVS), a global research initiative launched in 1981, which examines public values and beliefs in more than 120 countries, how they vary over time and the extent of their social and political impact. The WVS has proved an invaluable resource for tracking cultural change around the world and how it intersects with economic development and political life.
International demographic research is the focus area for the ISR’s Population Studies Center (PSC), covering topics like fertility, mortality, migration, and health disparities. Its work in this field has provided input for policies on family planning, public health, and aging, contributing to a deeper understanding of population dynamics.
The ISR is also behind pioneering longitudinal studies exploring the historical evolution of issues of major relevance to the U.S. population. One such is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which since 1968 has tracked the economic, social, and health factors that influence the lives of American families over time. Data from the PSID have been instrumental in shaping public policies addressing poverty, income inequality, and social mobility, providing an empirical foundation for legislative actions and social programs worldwide.
Since 1992, the ISR’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS) has been surveying a representative sample of Americans over the age of 50, collecting comprehensive data on income, work, assets, pension plans, health insurance, disability, physical health and functioning, cognitive functioning, and healthcare expenditures. The HRS has become a touchstone for policymakers and researchers, informing decisions on social security, healthcare, and retirement planning. Its methodology has been adopted by more than 40 countries, underscoring the ISR’s global leadership in aging research.
In the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the ISR runs one of the world’s largest digital archives of social science data, hosting more than 250,000 datasets on topics such as education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse and terrorism, making it a prized resource for researchers around the world.
NORC: at the forefront of research and methodological rigor
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.
Nominators
A total of 36 nominations were received in this edition, comprising 40 candidates. The awardee institutions were nominated by Ethan Bueno de Mesquita , Sydney Stein Professor and Dean of the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago (United States); Domenico Grasso , President of the University of Michigan (United States) and Julio Iglesias de Ussel , member of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (Spain).
Social Sciences committee and evaluation support panel
The committee in this category was chaired by Dolores Albarracín , Amy Gutmann Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (United States) and BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Social Sciences. The secretary was José Muñiz , a member of the Governing Council of Nebrija University (Spain) and of the Spanish Academy of Psychology.
Remaining members were Matilde Carlón , Professor of Administrative Law at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain); José Ramón Montero , Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain); and Simone Schnall , Professor of Experimental Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).
The evaluation support panel of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was coordinated by Elena Cartea , Deputy Vice-President for Scientific-Technical Areas at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Sebastian Rinken , Tenured Scientist at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies (IESA, CSIC), and formed by: Héctor Cebolla Boado , Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD-CCHS, CSIC); Marta Fraile Maldonado , Tenured Scientist and Deputy Director at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CCHS, CSIC); and Ana López Sala , Scientific Researcher at the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD-CCHS, CSIC).
About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards
The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and its transmission to society, along with the recognition of talent through families of awards organized alone or in conjunction with scientific societies and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, funded with 400,000 euros in each of their eight categories, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in basic sciences, biomedicine, environmental sciences and climate change, social sciences, economics, the humanities and music. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good, the best tool at our command to confront the defining challenges of our time and expand individual worldviews. Their eight categories are congruent with the knowledge map of the 21st century.
A total of 34 Frontiers of Knowledge laureates in the 17 editions held to date have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
The BBVA Foundation is partnered in these awards by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country’s premier public research organization. CSIC appoints evaluation support panels made up of leading experts in the corresponding knowledge area, who are charged with undertaking an initial assessment of candidates and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating each committee’s chair across the eight prize categories and participates in the selection of remaining members, helping to ensure objectivity in the recognition of those who have achieved particularly significant advances in science and in music. The presidency of CSIC also has a prominent role in the awards ceremony held each year in Bilbao, the permanent home of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards.