Michigan Research
July 2026Every good decision rests on good data, and good data rests on people willing to answer the questions researchers ask. This edition of Michigan Research spends time with the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, where scholars have spent more than 75 years measuring how Americans live, work, age and struggle, and are now working to keep that measurement trustworthy as society grows more skeptical.
What’s on This Page
The study that keeps listening: How U-M built the world’s map of aging
By Eric Shaw
The hardest questions about growing old require a comprehensive approach. For 34 years, the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study has gathered economists, physicians and geneticists around the same 20,000 aging Americans, and has revealed many insights that help people live healthier and longer lives.
Read how ISR became the place the world trusts to understand dementia, retirement and how we age.
As society changes, the U-M Institute for Social Research informs
By Kate Cagney
Director of the Institute for Social Research
For 75 years, the U-M Institute for Social Research has worked like a telescope on society, showing the country which families are falling behind and which interventions work. In this op-ed, ISR Director Kate Cagney argues that the tool is getting harder to aim. Response rates are falling and public trust is fragile just as reliable data matters most.
Read Kate Cagney on keeping the telescope on society in focus.
Washington is ending its 30-year food insecurity report. U-M research shows why the numbers still matter.
By Jon Meerdink
“Virtually unchanged.” That was the USDA’s reason for ending a food insecurity report it had published every year since 1995. Researchers at U-M’s Institute for Social Research, who have followed the same families since 1968, found the opposite. Hunger moves sharply whenever federal policy does, and chronic food insecurity has more than doubled.
Read how a 57-year U-M study tracks what the federal numbers miss.
Impact stories: Research at the University of Michigan
New paper finds there may be no safe level of air pollution exposure
Four years. That is how much a lifetime of heavy industrial pollution took off people’s lives in a new U-M study, and even minimal exposure cost one to two. Reed DeAngelis and colleagues at the Institute for Social Research followed the same Americans from 1986 to 2019 and found little sign of a safe threshold. Read how even low pollution exposure shortened American lives.
By Jon Meerdink
Institute for Social Research
Awareness gap: Teens underestimate fentanyl threat
About 22 American high schoolers die of a fentanyl overdose every week, yet most eighth graders do not see the drug as a serious threat. A new U-M study found that 52% did not rate experimental fentanyl use as high risk, a gap researchers say stronger messaging could help close. Read how a gap in awareness could be costing teenagers their lives.
By Fernanda Pires
Michigan News
Why do people go to concerts? U-M is helping the Berlin Philharmonic find out
When a Berlin Philharmonic audience is truly gripped, you can hear it in the silence. That counterintuitive measure is one of the things U-M’s Institute for Social Research is chasing as it helps the 144-year-old orchestra answer a deceptively simple question: why do people go to concerts, and how long does the music stay with them? Read how silence became a way to measure a great performance.
By Jon Meerdink
Institute for Social Research
About Michigan Research
Michigan Research is the University of Michigan’s flagship monthly e-newsletter, produced by the Office of the Vice President for Research. Each edition spotlights groundbreaking U-M research and scholarship that addresses critical challenges, sparks innovation and shapes the future across a range of disciplines.
