Our Northeastern colleagues in the School of Journalism, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities and Khoury College of Computer Science are making a major announcement about a polling initiative to help local newsrooms during the upcoming election season. Please see the information below.
Empowering local journalism through enhanced capacity for local and state-level surveys
In partnership with Knight Foundation and the Knight Election Hub, Northeastern University is offering to boost polling capacity for newsrooms during election season. At no cost to newsrooms, our social science and data team at Northeastern University, building on a multi-year runway of state-level polling with support from the National Science Foundation, is offering to conduct two waves of surveys during the 2024 election season. Survey questions and directions will be co-created in partnership between the academic and news teams.
To be eligible, please sign up here through the Knight Election Hub: https://www.knightelectionhub.org/
And feel free to email us if you are interested and want to learn more: j.wihbey@northeastern.edu
More details:
Northeastern University has developed the capacity for conducting low-cost, large-scale surveys, based on our experiences with our COVID States Project/Chip50 (see https://www.chip50.org/about-us.) Our project has, since April 2020, surveyed around 25,000 Americans, across all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, approximately every 6-8 weeks. With the support of the NSF, NIH, and a handful of foundations, we have conducted 1400+ state-level surveys since April, 2020, producing 100+ public facing reports and a wide set of “data dashboards.”
We are now running a pilot project involving 10 newsrooms in 10 states (including all swing states). We are currently planning on conducting two surveys during the summer/fall of 2024, as supported by the National Science Foundation. The objective would be to partner with those newsrooms to establish: (1) what are broad policy questions relevant to the election that all/most of the newsrooms would be interested in; (2) what are policy questions relevant to the election distinctive to their state. We would meet with representatives of partner newsrooms before each of the two survey waves, working with them to translate their questions regarding public opinion into survey questions, which we would then field with our two existing surveys; and produce one long report regarding the policy issue of general interest (where we would have state-specific numbers, but also numbers for every state + DC); plus short reports summarizing findings.
We are also looking to continue this work after the 2024 election, and so an ongoing set of newsroom partnerships is an aspiration.
The survey team is led by computational/data scientists and journalism faculty at Northeastern University. Lead faculty are: David Lazer, d.lazer@northeastern.edu ; and John Wihbey, j.wihbey@northeastern.edu.
If you have any questions about the Knight Election Hub, please reach out to elections24@knightfoundation.org.
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