Surveys

James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman

August 2021

Parents in late-modern America lavish time, energy, and resources on their children, carefully selecting the activities, relationships, schools, and moral communities that they believe will help their children become responsible, successful adults. Despite parents’ best efforts, however, it is often the unintended messages emitted in a variety of institutional settings—families, schools, popular media, friendship networks, and faith communities—that are key to forming their enduring habits, character, and patterns of civic participation. This multiyear effort explores the moral universe of parents, the values of their teenage children, and the points of both convergence and divergence between the two, surveying 3,200 parent-teen dyads across the nation with teenagers age 13 to 19, enrolled in school, and still living at home.

James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman, Kyle Puetz

November 2020

A landmark Institute survey finds that “fear was driving the passions of this election” and that each side “viewed the other as enemies of our modern liberal democratic order.”

James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman

December 2016

The Vanishing Center of American Democracy, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s 2016 Survey of American Political Culture, was conducted between Aug. 8 and Aug. 31, 2016 with more than 1,900 Americans taking part. Fielded by the Gallup Organization, the survey examines the contours and depths of American political culture during a contentious and unsettled time. The survey report was released at an event at the Gallup headquarters on October 12, 2016, which featured presentations by authors James Davison Hunter and Carl Bowman and guest panelists Thomas Edsall and Nancy Isenberg. Watch the C-SPAN 2 coverage of the event here: https://www.c-span.org/video/?416823-1/discussion-focuses-political-culture-2016

Carl Desportes Bowman

December 2012

The Culture of American Families: A National Survey provides a summary and discussion of key findings from the nationally representative survey of parents of school-age children. It explores the state of the American Family from the parents’ perspective, including their activities, cultural beliefs and assumptions, aspirations for their children’s future, and interactions with their children. It also introduces four distinct family cultures—The Faithful, Engaged Progressives, The Detached, and American Dreamers—as a way to understand the moral ecology within which children, and their parents, reside. This report includes the complete survey questionnaire with the distributions of response to each question.

Carl Desportes Bowman, Jeffrey Dill, James Davison Hunter

December 2012

The Culture of American Families: Executive Report provides an extensive summary of the findings in the Culture of American Families: A National Survey and Culture of American Families: Interview Report and includes thoughts for practitioners working with American families on a daily basis.

Jeffrey Dill

2012

This report summarizes preliminary findings and general, overarching themes from the interview component of the Culture of American Families Project.

Carl Desportes Bowman, James Davison Hunter

2003

The survey led to two publications authored by Carl Bowman in The Hedgehog Review— "The Evidence for Empire," Spring 2003 and "The Myth of a Non Polarized America," Fall 2010 — and was cited repeatedly in the footnotes of our 2016 survey report, "The Vanishing Center of American Democracy."

James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman

December 2000

Surveys on contemporary politics abound, but surveys of political culture, the underpinning of politics, are lacking. The Politics of Character survey attempts to bridge the gap between ephemeral opinion and enduring understandings of character, linking the latter to the moral communities to which American citizens belong. A principal finding is that understandings of character are vague and weakly grounded, and that “character” in politics is more important rhetorically than practically. It is an ideal in search of substantive content.

James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman

December 1996

The purpose of the 1996 Survey of American Political Culture was to assess the reality behind popular depictions of the declining legitimacy of American institutions and cultural fragmentation. Toward this end, a comprehensive questionnaire explores connections between political opinions and the cultural contexts within which they are formed. Topics include: the “Christian Right,” homosexuality, identity politics, visions of America’s future, moral relativism, the role of government, political ideology, religious beliefs and activities, and a variety of lifestyle questions. What distinguishes this survey is its breadth and depth of coverage, both of which lend nuance to its findings. It was based upon over 2,000 face-to-face interviews and its summary report, The State of Disunion, is widely cited in publications and on the Internet.

James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman

December 1990

The Life Choices Study was an in-depth study of Americans’ beliefs and opinions on a variety of life-related issues, abortion being first and foremost among them. Additionally, euthanasia, capital punishment, and military service receive brief treatment. The survey attempts to penetrate the broader cultural currents underlying the polarizations and contradictions that characterize public opinion on these matters. The study was guided by the following questions: Why do people diverge so sharply in their views? Who are those that lie at the extremes and in the middle? What systems of moral reasoning anchor their opinions? Which appeals, arguments, and obligations have the greatest impact upon their views? Sampling and fieldwork was performed by the Gallup Organization. DATA FILE: Cases: 2,174; Variables: 281 DATA COLLECTION: May 7–21, 1990