Don Kimelman on Pew's Civic Initiatives and the Pew Research Center

Don Kimelman

Managing Director, Information Initiatives and the Philadelphia Program

The Pew Charitable Trusts

Don Kimelman, managing director of Pew's Information Initiatives and the Philadelphia Program, oversees the development of Pew's work to inform and engage the public and opinion leaders on issues and trends shaping America and the world. This work is primarily carried out through nonpartisan polling and social science research by the Pew Research Center. Don also leads Pew's efforts to help improve civic life in the Philadelphia region and nationally.

We previously interviewed Don four years ago for Trust magazine as Pew was bringing together its multiple polling and research projects into one organization, the Pew Research Center. The center currently includes the Pew Hispanic Center, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Pew Global Attitudes Project and the center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and Social and Demographic Trends Project.

Our Web editors caught up with Don to get his take on the latest developments at the center, particularly as it produces an array of timely reports on the 2008 presidential race. We will follow up with Don at a later date to discuss Pew's work in Philadelphia.

Questions and Answers

Question

Andrew Kohut, the Pew Research Center’s director, recently discussed honesty – and dishonesty – in polls during an appearance on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. How does the Pew Research Center approach its survey work to ensure as high quality results as possible despite variations in the public’s commitment to answering pollsters truthfully?

Answer

Kimelman: It's been fascinating to me as a former journalist with no polling expertise to witness the incredible care that the polling professionals at the Pew Research Center take to ensure accurate results. Many of the questions that are asked on a given poll have provenance—the exact phrasing has been used in past polls and found over the years to deliver reliable responses. When new questions are developed, care is taken to word them in ways that don’t favor a particular response. Similar attention is paid to the order in which questions are asked.

Of course, people can always lie to pollsters—or, more typically, give "socially desirable" answers that are not fully honest. But Andy Kohut has concluded over the years that such behavior does not occur frequently enough to distort results. What keeps the Pew pollsters up at night is the fear that people who refuse to participate in a given survey have somewhat different views than those who do—even after you correct for age, income, gender and other demographic factors. So, for example, Pew pollsters do not worry that a lot of whites who say they plan to vote for Obama are lying. They do worry that whites who reject Obama for racial reasons may disproportionately refuse to be interviewed.

We’ll find out in November if this is indeed a problem, when the final pre-election polls are compared to the actual results a couple of days later.

Question

As the presidential race heats up, the amount of press coverage candidates receive is getting the public’s attention. The Pew Research Center closely follows both the public opinion about the candidates, and the media’s campaign coverage. What do their findings show?

Answer

This election year, the Pew Research Center developed a new service—a Campaign Coverage Index. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which is part of the center, analyzes the output of 48 news organizations on a daily basis to develop a representative sample of what the media is—and isn't—covering. The campaign has been a huge story all year, getting far more attention than anything else going on in the nation or the world, including news about the economy. In fact, the recent financial crisis on Wall Street marked only the second time this year that an event other than the campaign emerged as the topic most covered in the news. Pew polling has found great public interest in the campaign, but I think it's fair to say that the coverage outstrips the interest. The reverse is true on the economy.

Within the campaign coverage, Barack Obama has dominated. Week after week, with few exceptions, he has gotten more coverage than John McCain. By mid-August, Pew polling had diagnosed a case of "Obama fatigue"—people said they were hearing too much about Obama and too little about McCain. The balance has been more even since the conventions, and, with the debates looming, that may become the pattern for the final weeks. Sarah Palin, of course, has been getting far more attention than Joe Biden.

Question

The Pew Research Center covers a wide variety of topics through its various projects from global opinion about the U.S to the trends among working parents. Are there any plans to expand into additional areas? How do the center’s projects choose the direction of their survey work?

Answer

The projects have very broad mandates, so there are few topics of interest we can't pursue in our current configuration. The People-Press project polls on politics, policy issues and media use and interest. The Global Attitudes Project has a mandate to poll in any country about any issue of trans-national concern. The Project for Excellence in Journalism covers the ever-evolving media business. And so on. The center's newest initiative, the Social and Demographic Trends project, has a similarly wide mission to explore issues of societal concern. In March, for instance, it released a major report on the state of the middle class – a core issue in this election year—that combined fresh polling data with an analysis of relevant economic and Census data.

In general the center's project leaders operate a lot like journalists—and most indeed have backgrounds in journalism. They are constantly on the lookout for issues of emerging import that can be fleshed out through timely studies. Because the center is filling information gaps on matters of considerable public interest, the studies tend to get a lot of media attention.

Question

The United States news industry has seen a decline in circulation and revenues of print media. The Pew Research Center has multiple projects that follow and analyze journalism and the media. What role could non-profits and philanthropies play to aid this ailing, but important, industry?

Answer

This is a big topic of discussion in the philanthropic world right now. For years we have depended on for-profit news organizations, particularly newspapers, to provide citizens with the news and civic information they need to fulfill their essential role in a democracy. As newspapers cut back, who will pick up the slack? There are no easy answers because the task is enormous and highly diffuse. The greatest need right now is not at the national and international levels, where there is still a lot of good journalism being done, but at the local level. It costs a lot of money to cover City Hall, crime, the courts and the like, year in and year out, in thousands of communities. Philanthropists around the country recognize the need, but worry about making commitments that can’t be sustained over time. Perhaps new economic models will emerge. If not, I suspect we’ll see a growing reliance on nonprofit alternatives.

Question

Some of the recent findings of the Global Attitudes Survey have painted a discouraging picture of America’s image abroad. How does this information contribute to the discussion of the United States’ reputation and place in the world? What’s next for the global survey work?

Answer

The Pew Global Attitudes Project received its original round of funding in June of 2001, prior to 9/11. Its mandate was to measure public opinion around the world on the big topic of globalization, which was then the most important international issue (and remains a vital concern today). Because of subsequent events, particularly the war in Iraq, the project has gotten the most attention for documenting the decline in America's image around the world. The American public is aware of the rise of anti-Americanism abroad and, our polling shows, views it as a problem. The issue has come up in both the '04 and '08 elections. Next spring, with a new administration in office, we'll be polling again on this issue. It will be interesting to see if a change in power in Washington significantly changes the numbers.