Building Infrastructure

1
Building Infrastructure Alliances to Meet
Common Goals The Creation of a Canadian Public
Opinion Data Index
IASSIST Annual Meeting May, 2006 Ann Arbor,
Michigan Laine Ruus, University of Toronto Lois
Timms-Ferrara, Roper Center, UConn
2
Todays Two Part Discussion

• Creating a Canadian Opinion Index
• Statement of Need
• Partners
• Goals and Objectives of the Program
• Scope of the Pilot

3
Statement of Need

• Purpose
• Enhance Understanding
• of Canadian-U.S. Relations
• Vehicle
• Public Opinion Data
• Rationale
• Value of Public Opinion in a Democracy
• Coverage of the Data Collection
• Topically, the collection is wide reaching

4
Statement of Need

• Finding Aids
• Catalog of holdings contains brief abstracts for
  most of the dataset holdings
• No finding aids available for reports/releases

• Holdings
• 600 Dataset files since 1942
• Thousands of reports and releases 1941-2006
• Potentially 50,000 survey questions total

5
The Road to CPOLL

• Support for this pilot project was generously
  provided by
• The Embassy of Canada
• A Program Enhancement Grant from the Academic
  Relations Department
• The University of Toronto
• The Roper Center The Canadian Studies Program
  at the University of Connecticut

6
Objectives of the Pilot Program

• Using iPOLL as a model the prototype database
  contains Canadian poll results offers on-line
  question-level search facilities
• Complete question-wordings, permitting keyword
  searching
• Topical classifications
• Survey dates and organizations
• Top line responses
• Survey-level citation information
• Links to individual level datasets
• Data exploration tool to view subgroup results

7
Scope of the Project

• Data Selection

8
Scope of the Project

• Metadata Standards
• Topics for classification of individual questions
• Canada CPOLL Parliament
• Japan JPOLL Legislative
• US iPOLL Congress
• Nuances of the different English languages
• LABOUR vs. LABOR
• Political and Cultural Differences
• Online Analysis Tool
• SDA
• Nesstar
• To reduce costs, the pilot is an English language
  only database.

9
CPOLL Unveiled

• Current version contains
• 669 questions and answers
• IPSOS Reid and Gallup Canada
• Drill down to Roper Center catalog entries
• RoperExpress links to download datasets
• Modules ready for analysis using online data
  analysis
• CPOLL

www.RoperCenter.UConn.edu
10
Future Plans

• CPOLL
• Expanding the data bank to include a broader time
  series
• Secure additional sources of Canadian data
• Online newsletter for cross-national comparative
  results
• Further development of more SDA modules

• International POLL
• Integration of CPOLL and iPOLL and JPOLL
• Add multi-national surveys
• US Government studies conducted abroad by the
  United States Information Agency
• Expansion into other archived collections

11
CPOLL from your Neighbors
Merci! Thank you!

• Where thinking people go
• to learn what people are thinking