Nicholas Valentino
University of Michigan, MI·Social Science
How do Americans form political opinions and decide how to vote, and how can researchers measure this reliably? Large, carefully designed surveys are one of the main tools for answering these questions.
- Fields
Social Science
Mathematics & Statistics
Computer Science
- Topics
American National Election Studies
public opinion
survey methodology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Field pre- and post-election interviews for the American National Election Studies and add a 2026 wave to its first-ever ten-year panel, which follows the same respondents over time.
- Build a Social Media Study that links individuals' social media information to their survey answers across a long panel, creating a large dataset on political information use.
- Use artificial intelligence and automation to improve matching of survey respondents to commercial voter files, a step used to validate who was sampled.
- Test ways to improve survey quality, including a non-response follow-up study, better video interviewing, and a mixed-mode design that shows how the survey format changes answers.
- Apply AI tools to evaluate the ANES website and improve the accessibility and usability of its online data resources.
More about the research
Their value depends on drawing respondents at random from the population (a probability sample), so that results reflect the country as a whole. Keeping such surveys accurate is getting harder as people answer through different channels and get more of their information from social media.
Why it matters
ANES data have been used by more than 45,000 people since 2018, about 80 percent of them undergraduate or graduate students. New panel data, the social media study, and better methods for checking and representing samples could give researchers, students and policy analysts more accurate evidence on how voters form opinions and how survey methods affect results.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erik Herron
West Virginia University, WV·Social Science
Measure how Hurricane Helene's damage to roads, power and communications affected North Carolina's capacity to run the 2024 election, using interviews with state and local election officials and records of polling place changes.
Lorrie Frasure
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Social Science
Field a post-2024-election online survey of about 22,000 U.S. adults, including registered and unregistered voters and non-citizens, offered in up to ten languages, to measure political inclusion, participation and policy support.
Kenneth Joseph
University at Buffalo, NY·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop mixed methods combining graph-based and natural-language machine learning with qualitative analysis to identify dominant beliefs about social issues in large datasets from X and Parler.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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