As society changes, the U-M Institute for Social Research informs

By Kate Cagney, Director of the Institute for Social Research

Across the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, researchers who focus on survey methodology and who draw on the disciplines of political science, psychology, sociology, and economics are developing better ways to recruit participants, evaluate data quality, combine survey responses with administrative and digital data and understand how trust affects participation.

The question is not simply whether we can collect more data. The question is whether we can collect better data in ways that people have reason to trust.

At ISR, we have spent more than 75 years building the tools, data infrastructure and public trust needed to understand social life with rigor. In 2004, members of the ISR faculty described the institute’s work in a volume entitled A Telescope on Society. The metaphor still fits. The purpose of social research is to help society see itself more clearly as data reveal it.

Today, it is becoming more difficult in ways that should concern anyone who relies on data to understand people’s lives. Survey research, one of the foundational tools of modern social science, is in a challenging moment. Response rates have declined across the field. Attention is in high demand, and people are increasingly cautious about privacy and data misuse. Interactions have shifted from landlines to mobile phones, and from in-person contact to digital platforms. Meanwhile, misinformation travels quickly and trust in institutions is fragile.

This is why nimble social science research practices matter more than ever. We need new methods to ensure generalizable results, stronger protections for privacy and better tools for integrating multiple forms of data. ISR is built for that kind of challenge.

Consider the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, launched in 1968. By following families and their descendants over generations, the study has helped researchers understand how income, wealth, education, health and family life change over time. Its value comes from continuity: the ability to see how family conditions shift across decades.

For example, research by PSID Assistant Director Noura Insolera has shown that food insecurity does not just impact families that are in poverty; many families move in and out of food insecurity over time. By looking at the same families from year to year, we’re able to see meaningful patterns. Long-running evidence like this allows researchers to understand more clearly how families experience mobility, inequality and opportunity.

The Health and Retirement Study offers another example. Based at ISR and supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration, it tracks the lives of older Americans and has become a major resource for understanding aging, work, retirement, health, disability, caregiving and financial security. As the U.S. population ages, these questions are no longer specialized concerns. They shape families, employers, health systems and public budgets. The study matters because it connects individual experience to larger demographic change.

Monitoring the Future, also based at ISR, has tracked substance use and attitudes among American adolescents and young adults for decades. Its long view allows researchers to distinguish temporary fluctuations from deeper shifts in behavior and risk. Indeed, research led by Richard Meich has revealed a drop in adolescent drug use at the start of the COVID pandemic. Many experts expected those declines to bounce back once social distancing eased and life returned to normal, but that rebound never happened.

Data from the Monitoring the Future study show that teen drug use continued to decline through 2024. It’s a surprising and important trend, and it demonstrates why long-term studies are so essential to our understanding of society.

These projects illustrate one of ISR’s core strengths: the ability to build and sustain research infrastructure that endures. But the future of social science research will require more than preserving what already exists. It will require methodological innovation.

This is also why interdisciplinary work matters. For instance, ISR has partnered with the U-M College of Engineering to award pilot grants that bring engineers and social scientists together to study emerging issues in a rural context. Rural communities may face combined challenges associated with transit, broadband access, health care, water systems, energy, employment opportunities and demographic change.

These teams combine ISR’s strengths in measurement and survey research with engineering expertise in design, infrastructure and data-enabled tools.

In one project, an interdisciplinary team of researchers used cellular location data to provide better information about the characteristics of communities contributing to wastewater testing programs in Michigan, exploring how these data can be used to improve tracking of respiratory illnesses in rural communities. Collaborations like this one aim to generate data to shape interventions that are grounded in local context.

Reliable data are necessary to understand society. We cannot address issues related to inequality, aging, health, democracy, technology or education if we cannot measure them well. And we cannot measure them well unless people believe research is rigorous, ethical and worthy of their participation.

Our role is to strengthen the conditions under which evidence can be trusted, and our success will be defined by whether we can help societies see more clearly: which families are falling behind, which communities are adapting, which interventions are working and where our assumptions are wrong.

We aim to continue to serve as a telescope on society, giving a clearer view of the world as it is today.