The American Voices Project: Building a New Tool for Listening to the People

Catalog description

We live in a democracy that's supposed to heed the voices of everyone, not just the voices of the rich and privileged, but the voices of everyone. For a host of reasons, the U.S. has not lived up to this commitment. This is partly because we lack a viable technology for "listening to the people" and understanding what they are doing, thinking, and feeling. We rely on forced-choice surveys that provide a superficial portrait of people's lives and thoughts; we rely on social media that amplify the voices of an unrepresentative few; we rely on focus groups that are highly selective and distorted by group dynamics; we rely on small-scale qualitative studies based on convenience samples; and we rely on qualitative journalism (e.g., stories written by reporters) that are based on a small number of highly unrepresentative interviews. What, then, are the people actually thinking, doing, and wanting? We simply don't know. The purpose of this course is to assist with building out a new fielding of the American Voices Project (AVP) - the only nationally representative immersive-interviewing study in the world. The express purpose of the AVP: To listen to the voices of a representative sample of the U.S. by asking them to "tell the story of their life" and to reflect on their lives, challenges, beliefs, and hopes. This new fielding will be administered in approximately 8 months, so we're in the thick of deciding on the questions, how the interviewing and data analysis will happen, how confidentiality will be protected, and how we'll collaborate with journalists to listen to the voices of America in real time - as crisis after crisis continue to course through the country. The course will provide a bevy of opportunities to join up with teams and labs that are working on these problems. We will lead off, however, with an introduction to why all of this matters. We will examine how…