Featured Collections

The Roper Center for Public Opinion has created a new polling collection. Unlike the vast majority of national polls in the Roper archive, the U.S. States Collection is question-level collection of polls with state constrained demographics.

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, and the Special Collections Research Center at The George Washington University, Division of Libraries and Academic Innovation are collaborating to showcase the political polling of Mark J. Penn, pollster for President Bill Clinton and chief strategist and pollster in the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential campaign.

Joe Belden became interested in opinion sampling while working in the late 1930s as a student editor at the Daily Texan, the newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin. In an effort to learn as much as possible about the science of public opinion sampling, he wrote to George Gallup and received a response that included detailed instructions about conducting valid public opinion surveys.

From 1940 to 1977, the Bureau of Applied Social Research conducted surveys on a wide range of social, professional, and academic issues.

In the 1960s and 70s, the Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices studies surveyed women and men across the world about family planning, birth control, pregnancy, and sex.

The National Opinion Research Center is a non-profit organization associated with the University of Chicago. NORC has been conducting polls since 1941. There are over 150 NORC polls from the 1940s and 1950s that document the public's opinion.

The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development is based at Rutgers University.

Pew Hispanic Trends Project by Pew Research Center chronicles the diverse and changing lives of the U.S. Latino population and its impact on the nation. 

The Latin American Databank (LAD) provides a portal for Latin American datasets acquired, processed and archived by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

The Office of Public Opinion Research Collection, established by Hadley Cantril, spans the turbulent years of World War II. 

Under the direction of survey pioneer Elmo Roper, the Roper Organization conducted the landmark Fortune studies: over seventy survey projects undertaken between 1938 and 1949.

On the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Research Branch of the Information and Education Division of the War Department conducted the first in a series of large-scale surveys of personnel in the United States armed forces.

In 1970 with the Women’s Movement well underway, Virginia Slims began commissioning surveys about the role of American women in society.

This set of surveys is sponsored by The National Science Foundation—Science Resources Statistics. The principal investigator from 1979-1999 was Jon D. Miller, Northwestern University, ORC Macro (2001) and NORC (2006).

The Roper Center archives the entire collection of the UBS Index of Investor Optimism studies. A joint effort of UBS and the Gallup Organization, the UBS Index of Investor Optimism is the only ongoing survey of investor outlook in the United States and Europe. Introduced in 1996 as a quarterly survey, which became monthly in 1999, the Index profiles individual investors to ensure that their attitudes, perceptions and concerns are represented in the national dialogue. Through the Roper Center, the UBS Index of Investor Optimism - U.S. and Index - EU 5 data are available to researchers in several customized formats. For the U.S.

These polls, taken in the days immediately following the September 11th attacks, reveal the public’s personal reactions to the events, their fears about the future, and their views about what actions government should take in response.

Roper Social and Political Trends Data, 1973-1994, from RoperASW serves as one of three primary datasets used extensively in the research reported in Bowling Alone: Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam, Harvard University. In an effort to explore the current state of social capital in the United States, Putnam has tapped the rich collection of time-series data gathered by RoperASW (now know as GfK Consumer Life) from the fall of 1973 through 1994.

The 2006 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey is comprised of a national adult sample of 2,741 respondents and twenty-two communities sample (11 of which were from the 2000 Social Capital Benchmark Survey) totaling 9,359 community respondents.  The overall sample size is 12,100.Field PeriodThe survey was conducted during two waves.

The 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey was sponsored by three-dozen community foundations and others and was designed by the Saguaro Seminar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. The survey is the largest ever on the civic engagement of Americans.“At a time when President Bush began his presidency by asking us to be ‘citizens, not spectators’ and to serve our nation ‘beginning with your neighbor,’ the Survey shows that we have opportunities to work towards those goals …”–Robert Putnam

GSS 1972-2018 Cumulative Data File

The Faith Matters Survey was conducted on behalf of Harvard University by International Communications Research in the summer of 2006.   The survey was generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

The Andrew Kohut Collection includes a variety of material created/collected by Andrew Kohut throughout his career in the survey/polling industry.

Under a grant to the Universidad Católica del Uruguay (UCU) from the Uruguayan Research and Innovation Agency (ANII), Fondo Sectorial de Investigación a Partir de Datos, Roper Center will provide preservation and access for data recovered in a research project led by  Juan Ariel Bogliaccini and Rosario Queirolo of UCU, in collaboration with four polling organizations (Equipos Consultores, CIFRA, Grupo Radar and Opción Consultores).

These reports, which have not previously been available digitally, come from the United States Information Agency. Also known as the U.S. Information Service (USIS), the USIA was a foreign affairs agency in the executive branch of the U.S. government with a charge to explain and support U.S. foreign policy, interests, and values abroad. 720 historical survey reports from 75 different countries are now available to Roper members.