Russel Sage Foundation

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There are many social scientific questions that only the census can answer, and many more that it answers with more authority than any other source of data. As the largest social survey of the United States, the census is capable of tracking small groups and finely distinguished slices of the population. It is, for example, our only source of information about smaller racial and ethnic minorities, specific occupations, and particular income categories. Read More

The Cultural Contact and Immigration Working Group examines immigrant life outside of customary gateway cities such as New York, Miami, or Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the cultural frictions resulting from the rapid growth of the foreign-born population in the United States at a time of high economic uncertainty and political polarization. Read More

The Foundation’s Cultural Contact program is no longer accepting new grant proposals and has been replaced by the Foundation’s new Research on Ethnicity and Immigration program. Founded in 1992, the program sought to understand and improve relations between racial and ethnic groups. Read More

Since 1991, the Foundation’s Immigration program has looked beyond the immediate costs and benefits of immigration to the United States to examine how well immigrants and their children are adapting socially, politically, and economically. Read More

The Racial Bias in Policing Working Group examines the impact of racial, ethnic, and gender-based attitudes on law enforcement. The group is working with metropolitan police departments across the U.S. to develop policies to reduce racial bias in law enforcement. Read More

In 1992, Russell Sage Foundation was invited by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help develop an initiative aimed at strengthening educational research to improve literacy levels in the United States. The program focused on applying findings from basic cognitive science to educational practice that would foster the ability of students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to read, write, and reason effectively. Read More

The Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, RSF's largest single effort in the 1990s, was aimed at finding out why high rates of joblessness have persisted among minorities living in America's central cities. Despite a robust U. S. economy, millions of low-skill, inner-city workers remain unemployed or stuck in low-paying, dead-end jobs. One explanation is that the economic restructuring of recent decades has increased the educational and skill requirements for most jobs and that most inner-city workers do not have the training and experience to qualify for these jobs. Read More

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 altered the political, social, and economic landscape of the United States and the world. On that day, thousands of lives were lost, the structure of the U.S. economy was shaken, and the bonds of community in a multi-cultural world were put to the test. Read More

Too many of America’s most disadvantaged children grow up without the skills needed to thrive in the twenty-first century. Whether in educational attainment between income groups or racial/ethnic groups or across geographic locations—inequality persists. Low levels of performance among the most disadvantaged create long-term problems, particularly in an economy in which higher skill levels are more and more valued and the wages available to less-skilled workers are deteriorating. Read More

In 1994 the Foundation approved the formation of a working group of political scientists interested in probing what they perceived as growing citizen disenchantment with the nation's political system. Read More

In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation completed a major initiative to assess the effects of the Great Recession on the economic, political, and social life of the country. Officially over in 2009, the Great Recession is now generally acknowledged to be the most devastating global economic crisis since the Great Depression. Prolonged economic stagnation is likely to transform American institutions and severely erode the life chances of many Americans. Read More

Most of the Foundation’s programs are aimed at deepening our understanding of social problems and social trends that immediately impact the quality of national life. On occasion, however, RSF invests in social research for sheerly scientific reasons – when we believe that the long-term development of social science will yield eventual benefits in improved understanding of the causal forces underlie the flux of social events. Behavioral economics has been one such undertaking; our research initiative on the social role of trust is another. Read More

For sixty years, the Russell Sage Foundation has produced authoritative research on trends and changes in U.S. society using information from the decennial census. U.S. 2010: America After the First Decade of the New Century continued this tradition by reporting on key social and economic trends during the previous decade. Between 2000 and 2010, the United States experienced dramatic political, social, and economic changes and events. Read More

With the support of the Foundation, political scientists Theda Skocpol (Harvard University) and Lawrence Jacobs (University of Minnesota) formed a working group to track the course and fate of Obama's efforts to reorient domestic policy during 2009 and 2010. Members traced developments in eight specific policy areas: health reform, financial regulation, energy and climate change, tax policy, higher education funding, primary and secondary school reform, immigration policy, and labor law reform. Read More

Both scholars and citizens suspect economic elites have great influence on politics. Yet the scholarly research on money in politics has generally concluded that wealthy individuals and interest groups cannot simply ‘buy votes’ in institutions like Congress. This has led some to argue that the influence of money upon American political life is either "not much" or under estimated. The research findings in this tradition have mostly looked at the effects of campaign contributions upon Congressional roll call voting. Read More