Russel Sage Foundation

The American Voices Project (AVP), a joint initiative of Stanford and Princeton Universities, conducts qualitative interviews on social and economic attitudes and behavior with a nationally representative sample and is intended to supplement other forms of qualitative research. The AVP qualitative protocol begins with the prompt “tell me the story of your life.” The protocol is delivered as part of an conversation between the investigators and respondents and is followed by a survey assessing health, mental health, stress and anxiety, political views, social standing, discrimination, and more. After two years of data collection, sociologist David Grusky and his colleagues are preparing for the first public release of AVP findings. They will evaluate whether AVP’s new qualitative form might complement other research based on surveys and conventional qualitative methods, as well as the potential for a permanent AVP to complement other survey-based research methods. The AVP dataset currently includes 2,719 interviews of which only approximately 1,250 have been transcribed. RSF funds will support the additional transcription and de-identification of about 1,500 completed interviews.