Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Andrea Caumont

  • short reads

    Chart of the week: The problem of prison overcrowding

    Prison overcrowding is a problem for countries around the world, including the United States, where 30,000 California prison inmates initiated a hunger strike in July to protest solitary confinement policies at the state’s prisons. Now in its fourth week, nearly 500 inmates are still refusing meals. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce […]

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    Resilient American Values

    Optimism in an Era of Growing Inequality and Economic Difficulty Despite an extended period of economic difficulty, Pew Research Center pollsters Andrew Kohut and Michael Dimock show that Americans’ core values and beliefs about economic opportunity, and the nation’s economic outlook, remain largely optimistic and unchanged. There is also little evidence that economic class is […]

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    Video: The State of Race in America

    Pew Research Center Executive Vice President Paul Taylor presented on the state of race in America at the Aspen Institute. Download the PowerPoint presentation: State of Race April 2013

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    How to Access Pew Research Datasets

    By Scott Keeter The survey data from the Pew Research Center’s 2011 survey of Muslim Americans are available to researchers for downloading. The dataset can be downloaded on the Datasets page of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The telephone survey of 1,033 randomly-selected Muslim Americans was the second such study conducted […]

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    Yes, More Americans Favor Legalizing Gay Marriage, But Just How Many Do?

    By Andrew Kohut Recent polling clearly shows that Americans are much more accepting of same-sex marriage than they were a decade ago. All of the major national polls now find more supporters than opponents of same-sex marriage. But there is no consensus in the polling as to just how many Americans now actually think that […]

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    Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion

    The reaction on Twitter to major political events and policy decisions often differs a great deal from public opinion as measured by surveys. This is the conclusion of a year-long Pew Research Center study that compared the results of national polls to the tone of tweets in response to eight major news events, including the […]

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    Who Took the News IQ Quiz and How Did They Do?

    By Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research On Feb. 5 the Pew Research Center released a report on its latest NewsIQ Quiz, “What the Public Knows – In Pictures, Maps, Graphs and Symbols,” based on interviews with 1,041 randomly sampled adults nationwide. Since Feb. 5, more than 350,000 people have taken the quiz on the PewResearch.org website. A large majority of […]

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