The American Voices Project: Building a New Tool for Listening to the People

SOC 13SC

We live in a democracy that’s supposed to heed the voices of everyone, not just the voices of the rich and privileged, but the voices of everyone. For a host of reasons, the U.S. has not lived up to this commitment. This is partly because we lack a viable technology for “listening to the people” and understanding what they are doing, thinking, and feeling.  We rely on forced-choice surveys that provide an extremely superficial portrait of people’s lives and thoughts; we rely on social media that amplify the voices of an unrepresentative few; we rely on focus groups that are highly selective and distorted by group dynamics; we rely on small-scale qualitative studies based on convenience samples; and we rely on qualitative journalism (e.g., stories written by reporters) that are based on a small number of highly unrepresentative interviews.  What, then, are the people actually thinking, doing, and wanting? We simply don’t know.

The purpose of this course is to assist with building out a new fielding of the American Voices Project (AVP)… the only nationally representative immersive-interviewing study in the world. The express purpose of the AVP: To listen to the voices of a representative sample of the U.S. by asking them to “tell the story of their life” and to reflect on their lives, challenges, beliefs, and hopes. This new fielding will be administered in approximately 8 months, so we’re in the thick of deciding on the questions, how the interviewing and data analysis will happen, how confidentiality will be protected, and how we’ll collaborate with journalists to listen to the voices of America in real time … as crisis after crisis continue to course through the country.  The course will provide a bevy of opportunities to join up with teams and labs that are working on these problems.

We will lead off, however, with an introduction to why all of this matters. We will examine how authentic democracies depend on listening to the “voices of the people,” what we can learn from listening, and how and why current efforts to do so fall short.  We will examine why talk is cathartic, what it reveals (i.e., the “dark matter” of speech), and what it conceals.  After this introduction, students will have an opportunity to join a work team of their choosing, with the teams taking on such jobs as (a) testing the interview guide, (b) testing whether AI interviewing might be usable for some interviews, (c) building tools for real-time analysis of the AVP text data, (d) building new approaches to deidentifying the data and protecting confidentiality, and much more. This will all happen in the Center on Poverty and Inequality’s beautiful building.

Examples of Field Trips and Guest Speakers

The main point of the field trips is to get to know one another, but we’ll also make sure that they help us with the core mission.  The goal: To build a trip where we can have fun and get to know one another while learning about immersive interviewing by practicing it.

Sample Titles of Student Projects 

“Building a New Type of Journalism,” “Does Social Dark Matter Exist and, if it does, Where Can it be Found?,” “Evaluating a Human-in-the-Loop AI Interviewer”

What Comes After SoCo? 

In past SoCo classes, I’ve invited students to join labs at the Center on Poverty and Inequality, as that’s the key vehicle for continuing this work and to become part of the AVP family.

Meet the Instructor

David Grusky, Professor of Sociology; Director, Center on Poverty and Inequality; Senior Fellow, Institute for Economic Policy Research David B. Grusky is Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University. His research aims to build new and better ways of describing, monitoring, and reducing inequality. Professor Grusky is also a former Resident Fellow and previously taught the SoCo course Poverty and Inequality.