Join the Tech Impact and Policy Center on January 13th from 12PM–1PM Pacific for How Tech Has Enabled Survey Research and Undermined It, a seminar with Jon A. Krosnick.

Stanford affiliates are invited to join us at 11:40 AM for lunch, prior to the seminar.  The Winter Seminar Series continues through March; see our Winter Seminar Series page for speakers and topics. Sign up for our newsletter for announcements. 

About the Seminar:

Survey research is a centerpiece of life in America and throughout the world. Billions of dollars are spent by commercial companies, governments, academics, NGOs, and others to track people's life experiences (e.g., the unemployment rate comes from surveys) and opinions (e.g., presidential approval, preferences for government policies, satisfaction with products and services). For decades, scientific survey data collection was strikingly accurate, though expensive. With the arrival of the Internet, the cost of scientific survey data collection declined, but unscrupulous companies took advantage of non-scientific methods to minimize costs, maximize profits, and lie to customers and the public about the accuracy of the resulting data. Fortunately for those companies, researchers purchasing cut-rate data have been complicit in misrepresenting data quality, a prevarication that served the short-term interests of the researchers but caused hugely embarrassing and public failures, such as the prediction that Hillary Clinton would win the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016. Reviewing this history offers an opportunity to see how tech can help researchers and dramatically undermine those same researchers, science generally, and the nation.

About the Speaker:

Winner of the lifetime career achievement award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research and the Nevitt Sanford Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, Jon Krosnick is Frederick O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of Communication, Political Science, Environmental Social Science, and Psychology at Stanford University, Director of Stanford’s Political Psychology Research Group, and Research Psychologist at the U.S. Census Bureau. He has expertise in questionnaire design and survey research methodology, voting behavior and elections, and American public opinion. He has taught courses for professionals on survey methods for decades around the world and has served as a methodology consultant to government agencies, commercial firms, and academic scholars. He is a world-recognized expert on the psychology of attitudes, especially in the area of politics and has been co-principal investigator of the American National Election Study, the nation's preeminent academic research project exploring voter decision-making. For 25 years, he has been conducting national surveys of American public opinion on climate change.