cover image: Listening to the Voices of America

20.500.12592/1of3kp4

Listening to the Voices of America

1 Sep 2024

We make the case for building a permanent public-use platform for conducting and analyzing immersive interviews on the everyday lives of Americans. The American Voices Project (AVP)—a widely watched experiment with this new platform—provides important early evidence on its promise. The articles in this issue reveal that, although public-use interview datasets obviously cannot meet all research needs, they do provide new opportunities to study small or hidden populations, new or emerging social problems, reactions to ongoing social crises, submerged values and attitudes, and many other aspects of American life. We conclude that a permanent AVP platform would help build an “open science” form of qualitative research that complements—rather than replaces—the existing very important body of immersive-interviewing research.
open science qualitative immersive

Authors

Kathryn J. Edin, Corey D. Fields, David B. Grusky, Jure Leskovec, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Kristen Olson, Charles Varner

DOI
https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.5.01
ISBN
2377-8253 2377-8261
Pages
31
Published in
United States of America
Rights
© 2024 Russell Sage Foundation. Edin, Kathryn J., Corey D. Fields, David B. Grusky, Jure Leskovec, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Kristen Olson, and Charles Varner. 2024. “Listening to the Voices of America.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(5): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.5.01. We are grateful for the comments of Stefanie DeLuca, Mitch Duneier, Shamus Khan, Timothy Nelson, Yu Xie, and the Russell Sage Foundation reviewers. The views expressed are the authors’ alone and do not represent those of any of the organizations with whom the authors are affiliated, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve System, or its Board of Governors. Direct correspondence to: Kathryn J. Edin, at kedin@princeton.edu; Corey D. Fields, at cdf46@georgetown.edu; David B. Grusky, at grusky@stanford.edu, Center on Poverty and Inequality, 30 Alta Rd., Stanford, CA 94305; Jure Leskovec, at jure@cs.stanford.edu; Marybeth J. Mattingly