March 1998
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In Depth With the Center for Survey Research The Center for Survey Research has built a national reputation. Just last year an external review committee, comprised of several of the nation's top survey researchers, named the Center "one of the top 10 academic survey research centers in the United States."
"Our niche has been real high-quality research," says Mary Ellen Colten, director of the Center for Survey Research. "Our quality control is very high, which isn't true with some of the others," adds Lois Biener, a senior staff member at the Center.
The quality is such that local, regional and federal agencies, such as the following, utilize the Center's services: the city of Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Boston Foundation, and the combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. Funding has come from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Center of Health Statistics, and the National Institute of Justice.
"What we do here is a real mix of basic research and applied research," Colten said. Reports generated by the Center are weighed heavily by policy makers and often help increase the understanding of social issues. "We only do research where the results will end up in the public domain in some kind of way," she said.
Tobacco use, seat belt observation, attitudes toward euthanasia and a survey of Japanese-affiliated manufacturers are a few of the recent studies conducted.
"The UMass Boston center is highly respected," says Timothy Johnson, acting director of the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "A considerable number of the staff have national reputations, particularly in survey methodology."
Rising to the top takes hard work, as survey researchers need to see "the big picture," while working with a lot of details and a variety of individuals, Johnson said. "To be a successful director of a survey center, you have to be willing to be everything to everybody," he said.
Conducting survey research in an academic environment heightens the challenge. "We must serve a much broader community than just on-campus faculty and administrators," he said. "Universities expect a lot from their survey centers."
The Center for Survey Research divides its services into nine major areas: study design and sampling, survey instrument evaluation, interviewing, quality control, coding, data analysis, reporting, focus groups, and consultation.
In addition to Colten and Biener, the Center has four senior staff members: Floyd J. Fowler Jr., Brian Clarridge, Anthony M. Rowan and Robert Aseltine. "The senior staff collectively bear the responsibility for what the Center looks like," Colten said. The Center also utilizes skilled research assistants, interviewers and coders. Teamwork is crucial. "That's been an important piece in the history and success of the Center," she said.
The competent staff and national reputation garner endless requests for assistance. The Center provides free consultations but must often turn away jobs. (It is currently accepting no new projects until August.)
A trust of UMass Boston, the Center's services are available to the university on a contract basis. The Center's costs are covered by users of services and by agencies that fund independent research projects.
Colten sees the Center's soft-money status as an asset to the university. "We have been successful for 26 years as a grant-funded, totally soft organization," she said. The Center's success in receiving grants is an accolade to its quality. "You don't get the kind of money we get if you're not good," Colten said.
The future of the Center looks bright to Colten. "We see part of our mission as improving quality research," she said. The Center has been evaluating how questions are asked and working on innovative methods of questioning.
The industry will undoubtedly welcome new techniques, especially since conducting telephone surveys, the most widely used interviewing method, has become more difficult. Interviewers must work harder to convince people of the value of the calls. "The public is inundated with stuff over the phone," Colten said. "People really have to participate in this type of research because they feel it's worthwhile."