Center for Survey Research’s Expertise Aids National Institute on the Aging-Funded Research

By Anne-Marie Kent

Just about everyone has responded to survey questions at one time or another, but most laypeople don’t realize the level of care and scholarship needed to create a truly reliable survey. UMass Boston’s Center for Survey Research (CSR) is known nationally and internationally for its rigorous standards in designing survey instruments and collecting survey data that yield credible results.

“The center conducts a mixture of projects,” explains Director Mary Ellen Colten. “Its seven senior staff write grant proposals following their own study interests. In other cases, we assist other scholars who contact us to design their surveys and collect data for them. What we offer is our methodological expertise and experience, and all the data collection resources of our research and interviewing staff.”

Recently, the center’s expertise has been sought by Karl Pillemer of the Gerontology Institute at Cornell University and Jill Suitor of Louisiana State University. “We did a pilot study with them years ago with seed money from Cornell, looking at family relationships of older adults and their adult children,” explains Colten.

Now, with a new large National Institute on the Aging (NIA) grant, Pillemer and Suitor are pursuing a larger study with the help of the CSR, whose portion of the grant is $483,000. Through interviews of women between the ages of 65 to 75 years old who have more than one living child, they hope to better understand family relationships, particularly the dynamic between older parents and their grown children, and older people’s quality of life. The information may help influence the ways governmental and charitable agencies think about and plan services for older people.

CSR staff have already completed over 300 of the 550 interviews of women living in 12 Boston-area targeted communities, including Boston and Cambridge. The center’s staff developed the list of potential participants using Massachusetts town lists, which are a part of the public record. From the town lists, which supply age and gender information, staff were then able to develop a list of residents for interviewers to visit where they would be likely to encounter women in the age range required for the study.

The process is fairly involved. If women are willing to be interviewed, the interview can take as long as an hour and a half. Spouses (if any) and adult children are then interviewed, if the woman gives permission to contact them. “Most women have given permission once they have participated, since most of them find the interview to be interesting and enjoyable,” says Colten, who adds that the interview is completely confidential and coded numerically.
“The survey has an elaborate, complicated design in order to insure that the sample is well dispersed,” says Colten. She adds, “Doing a study like this, you want to be confident that you have a sample that is diverse in a variety of ways. We want to represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.”

Colten points out the uniqueness of the study. “When people think about aging adults, they tend not to ask about relationships between the children in the family or about the ways in which parents relate to each child in the family differently,” she explains. “Often these studies look at caretaking and child support for aging parents as if the children were a monolithic entity, rather than each having a distinctive history and relationship with the parent. Anybody who’s been in a family with siblings knows that the kinds of relationships kids have with their parents are very diverse and that children have distinctive roles within the family system.”

This $483,000 grant represents only a small percentage of the total grant support received by the center. Last year, CSR received over $3.8 million in grant support and this year’s figure is likely to exceed that. Other CSR projects have addressed problems in the areas of health and health care, community organization, employment, education, mental health, gerontology, law and criminal justice, public policy, and social service needs.

Image: Mary Ellen Colten, director of the Center for Survey Research, and her staff will assist researchers at Cornell University and Louisana State University in evaluating family relationships. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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