In a far-reaching project measuring American attitudes and behavior during the pandemic, researchers from Harvard and three other universities have polled people in all 50 states for nearly a year, reporting each week not just on evolving views toward the virus but on how the tumultuous political events helped shape the public response.
Among the surprises: the surveys have documented strong bipartisan support for tough state-level lockdown measures and found deep, ongoing public trust in science, despite media narratives to the contrary. At the same time, the polling has confirmed differences based on party, race, region, and education level on many issues, such as willingness to be vaccinated.
The research team has examined the relationship between the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests of the spring and summer, the divisive election campaign of the fall, and the persistent “misinfodemic” of false information online. The team’s goal is to keep investigating public attitudes and actions for the duration of the vaccine phase and through the hoped-for return to something like normal over the course of this year.
Along the way, the is building a deep reservoir of data on one of the most eventful years of the last century that should serve scholars for many years to come, gathering a quarter of a million survey points. The researchers have polled 18,000 to 25,000 people in every state each month since last April to generate the raw material. These findings, released in weekly themed reports, have been shared with policymakers struggling to figure out how and when to reopen schools and stores and how to get people vaccinated.
The three lead researchers are political scientists Matthew Baum, the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications at Harvard Kennedy School, David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University who also runs the Lazer Lab, and Katherine Ognyanova, an assistant professor of communications at Rutgers.
The project team counts seven principal investigators in all, including Roy Perlis, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Mauricio Santillana, assistant professor at HMS and T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Professor James Druckman at Northwestern University, and John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Another two dozen graduate students and post-docs are contributing.
While a number of national surveys explore aspects of COVID, few if any are in the field so often and with such reach to be able to delineate differences in regions, states, and even counties. The project has the added ability of including new