The American Voices Project is a bold new experiment in understanding the everyday experiences of Americans. Renowned author and journalist James Fallows moderates a conversation with key AVP researchers Corey Fields, David Grusky, and Hazel Markus.
American Voices Project crisis reports
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. We're living through a time of overlapping social, economic, climate, and health crises. If we're going to meet these complex challenges effectively, we need information. Not just the bird's-eye, broad-strokes kind of data like GDP, employment statistics, and national averages, but the truth on the ground, the lived experiences of people. Because how are we going to help each other if we don't do our best to understand each other? After a century of empirical social science, we still don't have a satisfactory tool for discovering what's happening on the ground for people in their day-to-day lives. And now, a joint initiative between Stanford University and Princeton University aims to address that problem. Today on Human Centered, we'll hear key figures from the American Voices Project discuss why they believe we need a new type of open qualitative science based on truly representative samples and that allows for secondary analysis. New methods fine-tuned for understanding the lives of people who don't have power, privilege, or money. This conversation, which originally broadcast on August 27th, 2021, was part of CASBS's Social Science for a World in Crisis webcast series, and it features panelists Corey Fields, the Eidel Family Term Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University, David Grusky, the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality both at Stanford University. He was also a CASBS Fellow in 1991-92 and a current CASBS Faculty Fellow. And lastly, Hazel Marcus, the Davis Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and 3-time CASBS Fellow. Moderating their conversation is James Fallows, the renowned author and correspondent for The Atlantic, most recently co-author with his wife Deborah Fallows of the book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America. The panel explores how their American Voices project expands the reach of traditional qualitative work while collecting vital data on community, family, emotional well-being, income, living costs, and more. It's also a valuable resource for fact-checking journalistic accounts and framing more traditional quantitative and qualitative research. They'll share some of what we've learned from the project so far, and whether it can aid in crafting evidence-informed policies. Now, join Human-Centered as we listen in on the voices of Americans in crisis.
James Fallows: Greetings, everyone. My name is James Fallows. I'm a longtime book and magazine writer, mainly for The Atlantic, and I'm delighted to be your host for the session we're about to have, which I think will be fascinating. This is the 17th episode of CASBS's webcast series, Social Science for a World in Crisis. I think I'm really looking forward to the discussion we're about to have with three eminent scholars and with all of you who are joining us. And so I hope you'll find it as interesting as I have found it interesting to learn about this project in preparation. I'd like to thank and acknowledge this episode's partners, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. You know that we have 3 very eminent panelists. Some of you know, many of you may know them already personally. I assume all of you already know their reputations and influence and work over the years. We have links that you've already received to bios of the panelists, and in the chat session, we're going to have, you know, more information you can click on. So I'm going to say just a word about the official IDs of each one of our 3 panelists so we can get right into the discussion of what we're going to hear from them. Corey Fields is is the Eidel Family Term Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University in Washington. I'll say that both Cory Fields and I have recently been living in Washington, D.C., as you can tell by the very daring and fashionable dress code we have both adopted for the day. One of Cory Fields' specialties is identity and the stories we tell about ourselves. And as you'll see, that whole identity and storytelling is a very central factor in the project we're about to learn about. David Grusky is the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University. And he was a CASBS fellow in 1991-92 and is currently a CASBS faculty fellow. He's, of course, renowned in the field of quantitative studies, which makes his role in this qualitative study so significant and fascinating. Hazel Marcus is the Davis Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences and Professor of psychology at Stanford and has been a CASBS fellow 3 times. Her work has crucially involved the role of self as shaping behavior and culture in shaping the self. And again, you will find these to be crucial elements in our discussion. Today's conversation is on the, the voices of Americans in crisis, a focused look at the work of the American Voices Project. Corey, David, and Hazel are among AVP's leaders, and we're going to— they're going to tell us about what they are doing, why it matters, and where they think it will lead. So here is how we propose to, uh, to proceed in the next hour or so of discussion. I have a few opening rounds of questions for our three panelists, mainly exploring questions both of process and also of substance— what the AVP is, um, American Voices Project is doing, and how specifically these three scholars have become involved in it. I'll then ask them what the AVP has revealed that's important, of importance about the state of the United States at this moment of so many overlapping crises for the country, and what implications are for the country as a whole, for academia, for journalism, and for related fields. And respectful of everybody's time, we'll keep the session to about 1 hour total. We don't have a hard cutoff time, but that's our target. And partway through the discussion, as the discussion gets underway, I'll be taking questions from, from you all. So feel free to queue them up in the Q&A session of the Zoom feature. And we'll keep— please keep your questions as concise as you can. We have one of the CASBS staffers, officials, is looking at them, will be feeding them to me. Probably, if past episodes or any guideline, we'll have more questions than we're able to cover in real time here, but we will make sure that all of them are passed on eventually to the panelists. So let us begin. I'd like to start with David Grusky and ask you, David, if you could just give us an idea of what this American Voices project is, why with your background you became interested in it, what members of this meeting, of this webinar, should know about what you all have been doing.
David Grusky: Yeah, sure. Thanks, thanks so much for, for such a great introduction, and it's a pleasure to be part of this, part of this event. Uh, you know, when you try to explain why, why an intellectual product happened, there's always two types of accounts that you can offer. One's an intellectual account, and then there's kind of the social backdrop that stands behind that I'm gonna neglect for now that social backdrop. It may well be that a fight that I had with Hazel or Corey accounts for some of the things that happened. We're not talking about that. I wanna talk about just kind of the intellectual impetus, knowing that there's much more to it than that. And to my mind, the intellectual impetus for the AVP is that after a century of empirical social science, we still don't have a satisfactory tool for discovering what's happening on the ground for people who don't have power, for people who don't have money, for people who don't have privilege. We, of course, hear ceaselessly from those who do have power, money, privilege. They have like megaphones permanently strapped on their faces, and we know what they're thinking, what they're saying, what they're doing. No problem there. But when it comes to the voice of the voiceless, I think we do have a problem. And the critic might say, you know, David, you're exaggerating. In fact, we have a lot of excellent social science tools for giving voice to the voiceless. So for example, surveys. What's wrong with surveys? Isn't that exactly what they're supposed to be about? And I, and you know, as was noted, I love surveys. I spent most of my life analyzing surveys and administrative data, and they do very important work, no doubt about it. But are they tailored for the task of giving voice to the voiceless? And I call that into question. And I think the real kind of crux of the problem is that the questions that are on those surveys that are on administrative data were designed by elites, elite social scientists, other administrative elites, and they don't necessarily have the sensibilities of the voiceless in mind, nor do they have the sensibilities of the voiceless necessarily in mind when they settle on the forced-choice categories into which those— the answers to those questions will be coded. And so it's not necessarily a method fine-tuned for understanding those who don't have power and privilege and money. And that, I think, is part of the reason why we don't have an especially stellar record when it comes to detecting crises early enough. And I would cite, say, the opioid crisis, the rise of populism, as crises that, you know, we should have as social scientists been on top of, and I'm not sure that we got the job done there. So, you know, let me just give you one other line of criticism that might be proffered. Someone might say, you know, David, what about qualitative methods? Isn't that all about giving voice to the voiceless? And here again, huge fan, huge consumer, not producer, but huge a huge consumer of qualitative journalism, of qualitative social science, and there's no doubt that it's immensely powerful and influential. But is it always getting the job done with respect to giving voice to the voiceless? And I'd call— I have some worries there. Why do I have worries? Two main reasons. The samples upon which most qualitative research rests are not representative. That's worrying. And we do not typically have the capacity to carry out secondary analysis. Of the data that qualitative scholars or journalists are collecting. And that's the way in which cumulative social science advances. And so we need a new type, I would argue, a new type of open science qualitative work that, that allows for representative samples, that's based on representative samples, and that allows for secondary analysis. And this approach makes it possible to do that. To check each other's hypotheses, to build on each other's work, and to generate truly cumulative science. And the AVP is a very imperfect— no doubt about it— very imperfect first step toward realizing that objective.
James Fallows: Let me ask— thanks very much for that framing of the whole discussion. And before turning to Hazel, I wanted to ask you a follow-up, which actually I'd be grateful to hear both Hazel and Corey expand on, which is, as you know, I come from the world of journalism. And essentially, everything I do is what you could call qualitative research. You're interviewing people. How is it that you know that what you're finding out from your studies is either different from or better than what I and my colleagues have been doing for generations?
David Grusky: Yeah, well, the first thing I would say there is that you have to bear in mind that kind of the short-form qualitative journalism that often appears, you know, in our daily newspapers that we all consume avidly and are immensely important, that's under the pressure of time, and you have to go with a hunch. Yeah, you think you know what the story is, you find a few people who can add color to that story, uh, uh, and then you got to go with it because the time pressure is immense, right? And you do what you got to do, and it's really important. But we don't know whether or not— I mean, that's kind of like an existence proof, right? You can get a few people who will say what you think the story might be, but that's not necessarily saying that those people that you get are representative of the larger population to which you want to generalize. And so that would be the crux of the problem with respect to kind of qualitative journalism of the short-form variety. Long-form is a bit different, and we can talk about that later.
James Fallows: Your emphasis on the deadline is, of course, a crucial one. The definition of journalism is the best version of reality you can produce by deadline time, which is, you know, different from what you all are carrying out. So Hazel, could you tell us now what brought you to this project and what you would add to David's framing of what you all are trying to do with AVP?
Hazel Markus: Sure. First of all, I would say that, Jim, your long-form journalism, I've learned so much about it from, so much from you over the years. And so if we could have all our forms like that, we would be in better shape. But I— Thank you. Absolutely. What brought me is what the potential of this project, what we have now is 3,500, a representative sample, 3,500 stories from people telling us about their lives. And we just haven't had that kind of resource before. And I'm a social and a cultural psychologist, and my focus in much of my work has been on how people make sense of themselves and their lives, and in particular, the ways in which they make sense of themselves and their lives are, are patterned by the social groups that they identify with and all their many diverse and intersecting cultural contexts, you know, their, their region of the country, their SES, their race, ethnicity, gender, what they do for a living. So what I found is that I've done— I've used many different methods as a psychologist, I've done many experiments, interventions, surveys. But what I found is the qualitative is so important. People often say, you hear that if you really want to understand something, you should follow the money. Well, That's doubtlessly true. But as a social scientist, I think that if you really want to understand behavior and variation in behavior, you've got to follow the self. The stories people tell about their lives, what's stressing them out, what they're afraid of, what they hope for, how they're coping, what matters to them. These are keys to understanding individual motivation and behavior and how individually tailored, custom crafted it is. But also, if you want to see how the culture is changing, and I think, you know, one of the reasons why we're all here is because we know that's happening in so many ways. If you want to understand that, where society is going, you've got to listen to large groups of people talking about themselves. You're going to see the future, giving them a chance. So I came to this interest myself when really beginning, when I was in graduate school at University of Michigan, I was an interviewer as a student for a number of surveys. I was knocking on doors in Detroit. I was asking people questions. You know, many of the questions were standard survey questions and they were good ones. I mean, standard survey questions have their place. All things considered, are you satisfied with your life as a whole these days? In the last month, have you— how often have you been stressed? Or give people a statement like, I have a clear sense of direction and purpose in my life, and see whether they agree with it or not. Now, as an interviewer going to the houses that were assigned to me, I was amazed in doing this, first of all, by the diversity of Americans, by the diversity in the ways that people live, but also in their answers to these questions. And also, you know, things that seem obvious to me now, but they were really life-changing for me then and made me into a social scientist. Those in— people in more affluent neighborhoods answered differently than those in much less well-resourced neighborhoods. Those with high school educations answered differently than those with more education. Black people answered differently from white people, from Asians, et cetera. There were patterns according to these groups, but also huge variation within these groups. And I think once you have an experience like that and you've been an interviewer and you have extended serious contact with lots of people, you start to get into their heads and you get out of your own head and you start to think differently as a theorist of social behavior and also, you know, as a scientist of people. And I think that's what qualitative data, chance to work with it does for you. And I thought then, and even more so now, that people that are social scientists, we should be much better. We should know much more about behavior, and we could be better at predicting it and thinking through how we might make various changes in society if we— and make some types of improvement in institutions that I think we're all hoping to— if we could listen to people more and how they're making sense sense of their experience. And I just say one other thing that I discovered that brought me enthusiastically to this project is that I was really amazed that people wanted to talk. When I was interviewing, they would patiently answer the survey question, but then they wanted to keep on talking to me. They wanted to tell me more. They wanted to explain things to me. They wanted to tell me the context. And what I realized is that many people, you know, not all, but many of them were very happy to have someone ask them a question, and then give them the opportunity and the space to talk about themselves and their lives, and then have someone listen and write down the answer. You know, this is— this doesn't happen to most of us in our lives, I think, to most people. And so it was, it was a, I think it was a gratifying experience all around for, for me and the others. So, you know, just, just in the last Answer to your question, I think the American Voices is a tremendous, tremendous opportunity to have this qualitative data on a representative sample and then to pair it with the survey questions because the study does contain 50 very good and standard survey questions, and we're gonna be able to go back and forth between the open-ended answers, the qualitative answers, the standard survey questions, and see, you know, what we're figuring out with the survey questions, what we're not, what we're missing, and really, as David said, you know, give voice, and I agree with him, to tons of people that haven't had their voice in our sense.
James Fallows: Thank you so much. There's a million things I'd like to ask you about that, but I'm going to ask Cory a question. But I just wanted to say, one of your points about people liking and wanting to tell their own stories resonates so deeply with my experience in journalism. It's a cliché that if you turn a TV camera on a person, or even a tape recorder, sometimes they freeze. But my experience is if you respectfully ask people to tell their stories, everybody has a story, and most people like to tell their story, and they get through this stage of telling you what they either think you want to hear or think will make you mad and get to, to telling their, their own story, which, Corey, is the, the transition to you. I know that you've been deeply involved with the way people craft their own stories and the ways in which people are reliable and unreliable narrators about themselves. Tell us about your work with the AVP and what we've heard from David and Hazel, the, you know, other parts of the project we should know.
Corey Fields: Right. That's quite the setup, Jeff. And so, in the spirit of not being an unreliable narrator, I will answer the question in a true, sort of true, honest fashion. So I have— I mean, I like to think of myself as having two contact points with AVP. So when I started out as a professor, I was an assistant professor in the sociology department at Stanford. And I got invited to this brainstorming for like this new idea for a qualitative publicly available dataset. And, you know, this was a pro— some vague project that my senior colleague David Grusky was working on. And so I was like, I guess, you know, right. They, they think there's gonna be some food at this thing. So I'll go and like, see what they're talking about, right? And I remember thinking like, oh, right, David, David Grusky, Kathy Eaton, like legit people are involved in this and they seem super genuine about it. But like conceptually, this seems highly questionable. I can't even imagine how this would be useful to anyone who actually does qualitative research, right? I was like, well, this seems like I'm guessing quant people wanna be mixed methodists. And this is like a way to do like a big survey thing and then be like, let me pull some quotes that illustrate the point. And so, like, those quotes will now be made publicly available. But thanks for the lunch. Here are some suggestions. See ya. Right. And that was sort of like how I left feeling about it, like the first sort of exposure to it. So fast forward to last summer, I get an email from David saying, hey, we actually got this American Voices Project thing off the ground and it's happening. Any interest in joining up with the PI team on this? We'd love to have someone with your background and experience, qualitative experience on this. And I was like, well, right, it sounds like you guys are doing some really noble stuff, hearing the voiceless and giving opportunities for everybody. But more directly, I'm a qualitative researcher in the middle of a pandemic who can't actually go talk to people, I can't be doing ethnographic observations. Of workplaces because workplaces are closed. So I got some time on my hands and I need some data. And like, this seems as good a thing to do as any. And so honestly, as someone who came to the project with, you know, a fair amount of skepticism, I've been really taken with how rich and useful the data actually is as a qualitative researcher, right? Like working, working with the data is what convinced me. Like I knew the, you know, the motivations of the people behind the project were genuine and true and all well-meaning. But what's been most striking to me is actually the quality of the information, like how much care and hope. I mean, I'd like to think that now I'm contributing to this care in terms of developing the interview protocol, right? The sort of the structure around like how the interviews happen and what, what happens with the data, right? I was really taken with, you know, how much attention was paid to that. But then reading the transcripts, listening to the interviews, right? I was incredibly struck by the level of detail in the data, right? In the story and how much you can garner from hearing people tell stories, right? And like, what I love about this project is so much of it is set up around telling me a story as the interviewer, right? So tell me about your workplace. And then that proceeds to this open-ended conversation. And then it follows up with specific questions about the person's work. But what you find is, like, as someone going through the data, it's like, oh, when it's just saying, tell me about your life, I actually learn a lot about people's experiences with discrimination in a way that, like, when they talk about workplace experiences, you hear similar things but a different kind of take on it. So I've been, in some ways, I would describe myself as, you know, convert to what AVP does, right? Like, and what it can do. And I, you know, in some ways as a qualitative researcher, it's working a little bit differently, right? Like sort of when I design my own interview projects, it's sort of like I have a sense of what the project is about, what kind of questions I would ask, and, you know, sort of, and how I would engage with, you know, subjects or whatever. Versus when I come to AVP data, I didn't structure the questions, or technically I did, but I'm speaking as if, you know, how another qualitative researcher might come to it, right? You don't structure the questions. So in terms of like how you approach the project, it's a little bit different, but I actually find it to be, you know, enriching in some ways, right? Like, and it's certainly, it's absolutely been a formidable experience in terms of like engaging with qualitative data and like the scale of the data is phenomenal and impressive. And like, this is sort of the, you know, the national representative sample being able to sort of say, oh, with the confidence of like, I've read interviews about this and I feel really confident saying, you know, this is what's happening with this segment of Americans because we have a representative sample of this segment and can compare it to a representative sample of people who are different from those people, right? Whereas like when I'm doing my own work, it's like, you know, I think it's methodologically rigorous and high-quality research, but I'm often sort of in a position of where I can say, I can speak to who I spoke to. Right. And I can sort of like intimate what I think that means for everybody else. Right. But when I'm doing AVP work, actually, I do, I feel like there is more of like, yeah, this represents what's out there. Right. It's like, at least in regards to sort of American stuff that, I mean, that's So that's, yeah, a little bit sort of long-winded and winding, but that's how I came to the project. And, you know, I feel like I've been the better for it. So I'm glad I got past my initial skepticism. And, you know, I guess silver lining of the pandemic got me in this.
James Fallows: One specific follow-up to ask you. You say that, you know, the richness of the stories has captivated you and revealed so much. Can you give an illustration of, a story, a conversation, a self-monologue you heard that helped you see the world a different way? Yeah.
Corey Fields: I mean, I think in some ways it's interesting hearing everyone talk about like their experiences of life in the pandemic. So I'm thinking about interviews from last summer, right? Like, and reading those. And what was really striking was like the ways in which, yeah, everyone draw on a really similar kind of framing for articulating their experience. Right. But the content— so there's sort of a formal way of talking about life in the pandemic that, like, I think linguists would love this data. Right. Like, you could sort of look at— like, there is a way that Americans talk about life in the pandemic. Right. But the content that fills that form is so very, so intensely. And there's this interesting dynamic where a surface reading would give a sense of like, oh, everybody's going through the same thing. Like, because what people are saying is like, we're all going through it and life has been crazy. And so like, right. So it's like, oh yeah, everybody's going through it. But once you sort of hear beneath, like, what does going through it mean? Then Some people are saying, yeah, it's tough. We're all going through it. Like, I mean, I got— my job has been closed down, so I haven't been making money, and my ex has COVID now, so I can't send my daughter over there because she has asthma, and like, I don't really know what we're going to do about that. And so— but my car broke down too, so we're just trying to figure it out. But like, everybody's going through it, right? Then you read 3— you go through 3 more transcripts and someone's like, oh, we're all going through it. It's like so crazy. COVID is just a mess. Like, my Netflix queue is a mess because my husband is home now from work and he's watching movies all day, and like, the internet is so slow because everybody— kids are doing school and I'm doing work. And it's like, right, like the formal structure of how they talk about life right now would give this sort of sense that, right, okay, yeah, everybody's going through it, and like shared, you know, collective experience. But read, like hearing, like when you hear sort of like the depth of the stories, right? So, and I think that's what sets AVP apart, because like I actually think it is meaningful and important that people tell their stories in the same way. I also think it's really important to note that the content of those stories are incredibly different, right? And that in some ways there's— it's like people talk about the polarization of America, which is like, I think is very real and meaningful, but my experience of like AVP data and reading the transcripts has actually affirmed for me like strong commonalities of experience, right? That manifests in the ways that people talk about things. Like there's sort of just this very sort of like American way of talking about your life that actually crosses a lot of sort of boundaries that we think of as being like super meaningful and important, which, you know, which isn't to say that they aren't. So I mean, I guess in some ways that's not speaking about, I mean, not a specific trans person, transcript that moved me, but more— but it is something I think that would only emerge having looked at this sort of representative sample of people telling their stories, right? And it's like, through sort of seeing that, like, you know, the shared formal structure, but the varying content of the American story of summer 2020 was, yeah, definitely like a striking and impactful experience dealing with the data.
James Fallows: Thank you very much. And what you say resonates, at least with me, on so many levels I can go into later on personally and professionally. But I also wanted to use your comments as a transition to the next round of questions. Again, I'll start with David, which is many of the audience and participant questions have come in, which are excellent, are about methodological and procedural issues, which we'll get to in a minute. I want to ask you, each of you three now, about some substantive issues that you've been conducting this crisis reporting, interviewing, qualitative survey at a time of, you know, the greatest public health crisis in a very long time, of economic dislocation, of racial reckoning, of political disruption, of every other sort of coinciding crisis the U.S. has been through. David, what is the main thing the AVP process has taught you, or you wish people would know more about what has been happening inside the country, especially people who have not been given the megaphone for having public attention. What do you know about America that you wish more Americans knew?
David Grusky: Yeah, great question. Um, before I get to it, I just wanted to follow up just briefly on one comment that Cory made, uh, that he was impressed, and I had exactly the same reaction, impressed with the richness and quality of the interviews. And so too was I. I had the same worries that Corey had, by the way. I just maybe wasn't so willing to express them, but as to whether or not this would come down well.
Corey Fields: But it did.
David Grusky: And in understanding why that happened, I do just, I'd be remiss if I didn't say our interviewers were extraordinary. Well-trained, I think, but not by me, but by the people who knew qualitative techniques, very well-trained, but they stepped up and did an amazing job. And it's really important to acknowledge that, Standing behind this is the work of lots of very, very committed interviewers. So on the question of what I've learned, I want to talk a bit about a report on which I'm currently working in collaboration with Joanna Williams, Michelle Jackson, and Charles Varner, because it's fresh on my mind. And I feel like I've learned a lot right now from it. And the purpose of that report is to examine whether the country's safety net, as CASBS, as it's currently configured, is offering help when people most need it. We typically debate about, are we offering enough support? Is the safety net as big as it should be? But it's also important to ask whether or not help is being delivered when people need it. Are we getting the timing right? And you should— it's important to recognize our safety net is all about certain bets on when we should be intervening. When we should be offering assistance. So it's built around institutionalized life course events, like losing a job, getting evicted, retiring, and so forth. We think we know when people need help. Are we getting it right? And one thing that we've found— and it's still early in the research, so this is— I could be interested in reactions to it if we have time— that often these events are happening, if you will, at the wrong time. These problematic events are not happening when we think they should be happening. Happening. We found time and again that, that help wasn't available when people needed it, and then they went off the rails in pretty irrecoverable ways. So, so for example, I'm referring to sexual abuse or violence that had profoundly disruptive effects on people's lives, and no one was there. I'm referring to relationship breakups from which people just couldn't recover, and, and no one was there to help them. I'm referring to accidents— so many accidents I'm referring to accidents at home, on the job, that brought on cascading problems. No one there to help. I'm referring to chronic mental health problems that were barely treated, shallowly treated, virtually no treatment at all. And that led then to cascading problems again that sent people off the rails. I'm referring to all sorts of exogenous shocks, you know, like a pipe burst in someone's house, or they had a fire, small fire in the house, or, or, uh, a death in the family, uh, threw people off course, led to cascading problems, and no one there to help. And so the ADP is very extraordinary. And you get the arc of someone's life. You're kind of like a societal psychotherapist as you're reading this, uh, and you're saying, oh, that's where things— they may not even know that, but that's where things really seem to have gone off the rails, and no one was there. And so it seems like, you know, in reading the transcripts for this particular project, there are really, really two worlds in America. There's a low-income world that has lots of shocks, many more than I had appreciated. Lots of shocks. They come at the wrong times, not when the safety net's there for them, at the wrong times, not at the safety net mandated moments, other times. And then of course they're much more vulnerable to those shocks than the high-income world. High-income world has fewer shocks. They happen at the right times when the safety net's there. Like, they get unemployed. Okay, we got unemployment. It's all good. And of course, they're quick to deal with them because they got many more resources. So the question is, what do we do? I'd love to fix our institutions so we're not delivering so many shocks to the low-income population so they don't have the resources to deal with those shocks. But if we don't do that— we should, but if we We should at least fix our safety net, which is kind of the institution of last resort, so that it's equipped to handle those problems when they crop up, given the horrific institutions that we built in this country.
James Fallows: Thank you very much for that. And again, something that resonates with me. My wife, Deb, and I made a movie this spring with HBO called Our Towns. And there's a large segment of it set in northern Mississippi. And we quote one of the most memorable scenes, a man named Raj Shaunak, who was a big figure in the East Mississippi Community College. And he said the story of their students is they were one flat tire away from losing their job, losing their house, having their family break up, which is again some of these exhaustion shocks. So Hazel, what does your work in AVP, what has it taught you about America of this moment that you wish more people knew?
Hazel Markus: So many things. Let me just say first to build on David for a minute though, I think that this data will has the potential to help us change the major narrative in this country about government support and government aid, because as we know, it's extremely negative, and people have the most negative views of the recipients of various types of aid. We've been dealing with this since Reagan told us the worst words in the English language is, "I'm from the government, I'm here to help." Ever since that period, It's just, we just built on that. But when people start to understand the kinds of problems, issues, shocks that people are dealing with and the precarity of their situations and really start to see, oh, those are the things that could happen to anyone and are happening to lots of people, I think we have the chance to really get the ball rolling on actually we need this safety net. You should have a safety net, you deserve it. So that's just, you know, what I think could come out of it. More specifically to your question, I've been putting finishing touches on a report on coping with loss during the COVID period. We have such fulsome data on that, and that's a report that I've been comparing with a really good team too, another social psychologist, Jeff Cohen, and amazing team of postdocs and graduate students, Katherine Thomas, Michael Schwabe, Matt Garcia, because one thing we have to say is that we do have this very great high-quality data, but that means we have a lot of high-quality data, and that means it's endless work, but we're doing it. In this report, what we've discovered is that in the early— as people start talking about COVID And as Corey said, people talk in some similar ways. It was stressful. They were depressed. They didn't quite know, you know, what they were doing, what was going to happen. They were uncertain. But then when you start to look at their full responses and you see these really sharp differences by education, race, gender, and really you see the two worlds. Were barely hanging on. They were doing their best to survive. But many people, the majority of people were— that's, I would say, characterizes the majority of people. They were hanging on. They were in there. But there was a good proportion of people who were actually thriving during COVID And so it was this contrast that was so, I think, apparent and so shocking for us. Some of the people we interviewed, they were describing major life changes. Sickness, death, financial insecurity, lots of mental health stuff. Other people were, you know, they were stressed out and depressed too, but why? Because they had cramped workspaces and their kids were coming into their Zoom and the kids were there all the time. And what were those— where were those teachers? And they either had too little time for themselves, there was no place, or else some people talked about having too much time to themselves. But these were two different camps of problems. And those contrasts were really stinging. And I think we saw that Black and Latinx people were disproportionately likely to experience COVID, a COVID illness or death in the family. They had a much greater and growing fear of contracting COVID. And these impacts, of course, of course, reflect the pre-existing structural inequalities in the lives of people with fewer resources. The job losses there were, of course, concentrated among people that don't have college education. And also, we did see what has been reported in the press as called a Xi session. We saw the women talking about having to give up their jobs, not being able to continue to work with daycare. And I think, and then when we saw the end of the benefits that came from the CARES Act and then a fresh round of layoffs that started, we saw many more troubles. In contrast, you had the people with the college degrees, the stable jobs, they were able to, you know, figure out how to live in the pandemic. And actually what we saw is that many people reported it was a kind of idyllic time for them. They got to pay attention to their health. They got to cook with their partners and their families. They got to go to therapy. They got to try new sorts of things, to read novels, to think, to have time. It was shockingly different. But I think that was important to know because as we start to see why a lot of people don't want to go back to work or back to the jobs, you see what it is. They found that life could be different. And, you know, it's possible. And how could they figure that out? But once again, that was very, very patterned by economic positioning. And that, I think, You could know from the survey data that they were different a little bit in their levels of satisfaction and how depressed they felt, but you wouldn't know the details.
James Fallows: That is so interesting and so rich in understanding the chaos we are living through. And I'll just have one other personal word before turning this, the same question to Corey. And then we have many fascinating questions from our audience. So the two worlds you're speaking of that all are getting through COVID, but with different, very different gettings through. As it happens, my extended family, one branch of my cousins is the kind of people who were having Zoom sessions and were thinking about their life. The other branch of my family cousins are non-college people. And so in the first branch, many of them are sort of reconsidering their life. In the other branch, several of them died, you know, just because they were, you know, in the vulnerable, non-educated part of, of the American population. So I've seen just in the nexus That is me, some of the, the contrast you were describing. Cory, would you tell us what you have learned from this AVP that you would— about America that you wish more Americans knew?
Corey Fields: Yeah, so I certainly would echo everything that David and Hazel both talked about, right? Like, I've seen that in terms of the work that I've been doing on the reports I've been working on, which, you know, have been focused on sort of like communities of color and the sort of the responses to sort of what's been happening over the past year. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, there's like certainly a similar narrative, right? And I think, you know, this idea of it's not a what question so much as a how question, because in some ways, the stuff that people are talking about in these interviews are like, it's like the stuff that's happening in the world, right? Like, that's the amazing thing about ABP, right? There is is a sort of temporal element to it because we're in the field constantly. We were able to actually get a sense of like how attitudes are changing with a pretty sort of fine-grained detail, right? So like, you know, as protests around racial justice were happening last summer, that's what people were talking about during the interview, right? Which is not surprising at all, right? Like it was sort of this big story. And for me, what was really interesting with looking at that, and this was the work that I'm doing with a professor at Providence College, Hassan Mahadia, is sort of looking at how people are talking about racial injustice, right? And what was really striking in some ways, and I want to preface this for everybody watching, it's like, I was not someone who was naive about race relations in the United States at all, trust and believe. But even for someone as savvy about it and somewhat cynical about it, but it was striking to see the extent to which there are two fundamentally different conversations happening, right? Like, so for white people in the APP sample, the conversation exists on what I call the sort of continuum of denial, right? It's like, is racial injustice a thing, or is this just sort of lefty bullshit that's not happening? And then like, and you know, people sort of place along that continuum. But the question is like, is this happening? And the response to it is like, conversation is what we need, right? And so having this conversation feels like a meaningful sort of action and engagement with the issue, right? Talking about it is important. And people sort of will report like, oh, I had to have a bunch of rough conversations with my relatives around George Floyd and It was exhausting, but I feel like I've done a lot, right? And it's like, not to minimize that, because I'm sure it did feel like this is a meaningful difference. Like, I haven't had to talk about race with my family before, but now I do, right? And it's like, you know, white people talking to white people, but the conversation is about, is this thing happening? Yes, no, right? Whereas when you read interviews with Black respondents, the conversation is, what are we going to do about this? Like, what action is it? People talk about things that happen to them, right? Racial experiences of racial discrimination and things that they want to see done in relation to sort of racial injustice, right? Like, it's not a conversation around, is this happening? Yes, no. It's much more conversation about, like, what are we going to do about it? What can be done about it? And what was really striking was, in some ways, there are conversations that talk past one another, right? Like, in, like, in, you know, reading the transcripts, But it's fair to say, like, I sort of walked away from it with— I feel like I'm sort of, you know, it's like I'm doing this thinking about this as a researcher, but it's hard to not sort of experience it as like an American, right? And so, you know, reading the transcripts, I definitely felt like, oh, I don't know what can happen as long as like they're two separate conversations, if we're not actually talking to one another about the same thing. So I mean, I definitely feel like there's this sort of, what are we talking about when we talk about race? Conversation that we need to have before we get into the sort of like substance of what are we going to do? Because I think we're having very different conversations, right, in the country, right? And in some ways, it gives the impression that like maybe there is more distance than there actually is. It's just like, oh, if you're talking about one thing, it's going to seem like, this isn't related to what I'm saying. Like, I'm having a different conversation. So we're not actually talking to one another, right? And so it's been really interesting to see that, right? And very much, but also to see the extent to which each population is completely committed to their conversation, right? And so it's like, right. So like, the white people are very much like, we gotta talk about this. Like, is racial inequality happening? We gotta figure it out. Like, is it happening? And like, to suggest that, you know, anything more be done than like talk about it feels like, let's not put the cart before the horse, right? Like, there's a very like sort of deep resistance to any like movement beyond talking it out, partly because having to talk about a lot of people, and it takes like exertion, right? Like it's sort of effort expended on a topic that like, hadn't been sort of pushed to the center of the conversation before. And Black respondents are sort of saying like, yeah, like what are we gonna do about this racial injustice? Like, what are we gonna do? What change is gonna happen? I wanna see racist people stop being racist, and I wanna see people punished for being racist, right? Like I wanna see these injustices remedied, right? Which is a very different kind of conversation. And now what's interesting is the extent to which these conversations happen in silos, right? So like what I didn't see was Black people expressing frustration with white people only wanting to talk about it. And I didn't really see a lot of white people being like, well, I mean, you got a little bit of it with like people's responses to protests, right? Which was sort of calls for action. You can interpret them as calls for action, but they're essentially The way that people talk about the issue also indicated how we're having conversations divided by race, right? And which in some ways, you know, speaks to a different, bigger problem that we're not talking— we're talking past one another, partly because we're not talking to one another, right, across racial differences. So that was really interesting. And I'm now working on working on a report that's looking at transcripts from the fall around elections. And this again gets back to, I think, sort of the temporal element of AVP and what's sort of fascinating about it. So like what's been really striking is to see how white people talked about racial inequality in the summer, and then looking at fall interviews where like, you know, they're sort of asked direct questions about Black Lives Matter protests, and to see the sort of shift. So in the, By summer, right, there was this sort of tension, like the continuum of denial that I talk about, right? Like, is it happening? Yes, no, I don't know. By the fall, what's fascinating is that essentially, I mean, I don't want, it's hyperbolic to say all white people, but like the white respondents in the ABP data are all sort of fundamentally being like, you know, all lives matter. I get it, racial inequality is a thing, but I really think focusing on Black, is it really fair to focus on Black lives? And what was really fascinating is this sort of leveling that's happened, because I think, again, and this is initial analysis, but my reading of it suggests that people on the ideological right sort of have maintained a constant, all lives matter sort of position. But by the fall, what you saw were people on the left, sort of being like, well, racial inequality absolutely is totally for real. Like, I am not on the wrong side of the continuum of denial. It's totally real. But all lives matter. But I mean, I feel like the only way we're going to get through it is to talk about everybody's life being important, not just Black lives. And it's interesting to think through, like, why that happens, right? So you move from, like, there's sort of variation in how white people are talking about racial inequality. To total consistency in how they're talking about racial protests. And I think partly it's the election context makes sense. There's a lot of what are gonna be the implications for Black Lives Matter on the election and blah, blah, blah. And so I think people's relationship to it shifted accordingly. And so people were sort of very concerned that it might have negative consequences for leftist politics and the election. And so that made people oriented that way sort of rethink their relationship to it. Whereas like the summer, it was much more sort of supportive, but by the fall, it had become much more like the ultimate ends, yes, we're on board with, but like maybe we can get there in a way that's not so alienating to people, right? So, and, but which was fascinating because in some ways when you read the transcripts from the fall, the extent to which like election decisions, people sort of like their voting decisions were grounded in things like COVID or racial justice protest was tenuous at best, right? Like, these are the things that the media— that we talk— I mean, and I said, when I say the media sort of meets, like, I'm a part of those circles, right? Like, the things that we were sort of saying, like, oh, this is what's going to drive the election behavior, this is what's going to drive stuff. Like, when you read what people were saying at the time that they were voting, like, it actually was not— I was surprised at the extent to which, like, like protests around racial justice or COVID, but didn't seem to be informing why people made the voting choices they did. So, I mean, I've rambled for a long time, but it's a lot of interesting stuff.
James Fallows: And I hope you'll get this information into the hands of political journalists as soon as you have it in form to do so. We have so many interesting questions coming in from the audience. I'm going to sort of boil them down into a couple of mega questions and ask them to you each. I mean, I'll sort of ask the questions to one or the other of you. So David, there are a number of process questions, which are sort of— I'll give you one or two samples. So it's essentially how you chose who you chose. One of the questions, please discuss the complexities and trade-offs in defining and obtaining a, quote, nationally representative sample. Sample. And another question: how do you sample your participants? Are the people who have contributed stories to the project self-selected? Several others in this vein. Uh, what's your methodological answer? And you'll, you'll be speaking for your three colleagues here on how you could do a sample of this kind of qualitative information.
David Grusky: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, the basic structure was to start with a of all census tracts, census block groups more specifically, across the United States, then draw a representative number of those. And then within those block groups, then those block groups draw a representative sample of households. So then we had our list of people we wanted to, or households we wanted to contact. In the pre-pandemic period, we had people knocking on their doors. When the pandemic hit, we, of course, had to withdraw interviewers quickly, and then we reverted to a remote interviewing design where we sent mailers to those same addresses that had already been selected and then carried out the interviews through the telephone. Now, I should say that method of drawing a sample is incomplete. We also had a homeless subsample because they're not going to be showing up on lists of addresses, right? And it's really important to talk to the homeless population. That has been suspended until we can resume face-to-face because there's no other way to really do that. The same problem holds with our Native Nation sample, in which it's difficult to carry that out through the telephone. And so that's suspended until we can resume face-to-face.
James Fallows: Yeah.
David Grusky: Great.
James Fallows: Thank you. So Hazel, there's a number of questions. I'll give you an overview of them that I'd be grateful if you could address. They're about the interview process. Seems— one question, it seems with open-ended questions, the interview plays— the interview and interviewer play an important role. Should I be concerned about an interview effect? Do interviewers go through some sort of standardized training and minimize this? A related question, can you share anything about the experiences of the interviewers? What does it feel like to be in the field? What does it do to someone to hear these stories? A related question, have there been any adverse or unintended effects on participants and/or interviewers given the potentially vulnerable nature of this work? What ethical considerations have been taken with regard to this? So the whole interview, interviewer process, tell us how we should think about that.
Hazel Markus: Well, that's a great set of questions, and that could be the source of another webinar about, about this. I think David already made mention we had intensive training of the interviewers to bring them into how to interview, how to wait, when to respond. They practiced before they went out. So we really worked hard on that because as the questioners are asking, that makes all the difference in the world. And it was hard for some people, beginning interviewers, I know a lot of students who start, they want to engage in conversation more than we want them to. They want to smile too much. They want to be reinforcing. So we had to get them to be positive but neutral, you know, just to get the answers out. So that's really one of the real advantages is that the training that was given to the interviewers. I would say the effects on the interviewers are much like I reported my own at the beginning. It changes your life to listen to the diversity of these stories and to listen to what a diverse nation, and in our experiences, we are. And you don't get over that. You can't feel the same about generalizations that you read on a daily basis about people in various groups. Of people because you know about these lives and you care about these lives in a way that I think it doesn't happen if you don't get this kind of training. So I think good effects on the interviewers. When we first started, some of our interviewers were wondering if we were doing enough on race and probing race and because we're about inequality. And so they pushed back on us. We had endless meetings and talk about this, and, you know, if we wanted to give voice to the powerless, were we really doing this? You know, we're the power people saying, "These are the questions," and shouldn't the people themselves have a voice in the question? So, that's an ongoing dialogue that's going to improve this work in the future. I think we made good strides in that direction. And as far as bad effects on the respondents, the participants themselves, themselves. We, we haven't heard of any of that yet, so that remains to be seen. We do have an experiment embedded within the study for— in which we gave some of our respondents a chance to think about what matters to them in their lives, what their values are at the end of the study, and other people we hadn't talked about transportation in their, in their city. And then we are looking at how that different— whether or not they got to be affirmed, which is, you know, the whole questionnaire is quite affirming to people, as we talked about, you get to tell your story, but whether that additional affirmation actually will make a difference in terms of when we contact them, will they contact us back? And then we're following them out on various behaviors because we raise a lot of things about looking for jobs and changing jobs and looking for various kinds of services and employment issues. So I won't go on about that study, but we have that built in there, and we will be able to answer the very good question that the people, questioners, are asking about impacts on respondents. That certainly matters.
James Fallows: And there's one more question about this sort of interview and story process, which I'll ask you just as we're getting into our final moments here. And people have asked a variety of this question. How do you analyze all this data? You have a huge amount of information coming in. What's the simplest way to describe how you analyze it?
Hazel Markus: Well, carefully, I would say. I'm perfectly— you know, with great effort. One thing I'm looking forward to is the possibility of, with all this, the transcripts and all the— from people, we'll be able to do a lot of natural language processing on these, on their answers. So we'll be able to, through machine learning and then, of course, you know, some supervised coding of that machine learning, look for themes that are there by groups, by region of the country, by race, ethnicity, we'll be able to do a lot that we could never think about doing before when we only had to do, you know, hand coding. But of course, we'll have to do a lot of that too for some of the more complex issues.
James Fallows: So I'm going to ask each of you now, if you can, just in 1 minute in our final round here, to get across the main thing you would like your colleagues to know about the AVP project. you know, that either that I haven't asked you or that I have asked you and you already said, but what's the main thing you would hope that people would remember about what you're doing? David, I'll start with you.
David Grusky: Sure. I want to follow up a bit on, on your question about how we're going to analyze these data. And one of the distinctive features of the American Voices Project is that, is that this is going to be an open resource to qualified scholars and to people in the community. Community. That public call is going to be going out in a couple weeks. And this is because there's no way that a small team can do justice to the richness of these data. This needs to be crowdsourced. This needs to be a resource for the full social science community and others, so that we can collectively understand what's happening. And so that is a distinctive feature of the AVP. And I invite everyone who's interested to, to, to take a look at that public call and see if they want to be part of this.
James Fallows: Thank you very much. So, uh, so Corey, in, in 1 minute, what's the main point you would like people to, to be aware of about the project?
Corey Fields: Uh, I think, you know, the— I would encourage people to sit with the data and experience it. Like what I found most striking for me was like coming to it as an analyst, right? Like even in that capacity, it was hard to not walk away with a sense of like, I understand my nation better, right? Like, I feel like sort of engaging with the ABP data actually had this sort of secondary knock-on, like, I don't know, like, I was gonna say patriotic effect, but I felt like I really did have a sense of what was happening in the country in a way that, like, my lived experience, it sort of, it illustrated for me the extent to which, like, my own personal networks should be understood as just that, my networks, not necessarily representative of what's happening. And so in that sense, it was actually really good. It was like a breath of fresh air, and that forced me to step back from like the news and information sources I'm constantly inundated with. I was kind of like, oh, you know what? Right. Thank you, AVP, because like, I, yeah, this is all a bit too much. So I guess I would say in that sense, yeah, it's a great resource to get a sense of what's happening, with among Americans, like in America. Now, I would also say, like, to sort of Hazel's point and David's, like, I think it's a methodologically complex data source. Like, some of the projects I'm most excited about doing with this data are actually to some of those questions that you just asked, like, well, what are the interviewing effects? Because it's like, they're questions that we ask people in a survey capacity, but we also gather information in an open-ended capacity. And like, they don't always match up. And it's been sort of fascinating to see someone who, you know, describes themselves when you ask them, what's your partisanship, check a box, they're like independent. But then when you go look at them talk about politics, it's like, you know, super progressive or super conservative, right? And it's like, oh, you know, you can get a sense about the sort of mechanisms of research with this data. So that's, yeah, that's more than a minute, but that's what I I would say.
James Fallows: So thank you. So Hazel, you can take us out of what is your minute of the main thing you would like people to bear in mind about the AVP.
Hazel Markus: We are amazingly diverse people, an amazingly diverse nation, and that's a good thing. That is not a source of division. That is a source of resource and asset and richness. And we have to understand this, and this data will to help us know this. We talked about the two worlds that people differ by SES. We talked about how they differ by race. We need to get into that, really know that, and we have to start to think about how we can devise different and better survey questions that will allow people to actually reflect on those differences, things that we don't ask now. And we have to stop worrying about that this is— if we talk this way, way. This is going to divide us if we don't start talking about how these are big categories of lived experience of gender, race, ethnicity, you know, what we do for a living, where we live, what part of the country we live in. If we don't start talking about how that makes a difference in our lives and the way we're experiencing the world, we are going to, we are going to come apart. Because in the process of doing that and seeing those particularities and those differences, we then do start to see some real similarities, some real, what I would call sort of American qualities. You see that here. I mean, even through all these real tough, hard times, people are like, we're going to make it. They're committed to just keep on keeping on. It'll be okay. It's depressing, but it'll be okay. So, but you see that only if you take time to look at these real differences that are related to people's socioeconomic cultural positioning. And this is one of the first studies that's going to allow us to do that. So I think you can see how enthusiastic we all are about this study and, you know, joining the social science community to work with us on it. Thank you.
James Fallows: So I believe I speak for all members of the gathering here today in thinking we've talked for a little more than an hour about things we'd be talking about for decades to come. And in this time of tumult through which the country and the world are now living, the kind of documentation and evidence and analysis you all are providing will be of enormous value. So I really wanted to thank David Grusky, Hazel Marcus, and Corey Fields for their wonderful comments here. I'd like to also thank our events partner organizations, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Stanford Center on Poverty and inequality. And a heads up for everyone that more episodes are coming in CASBS's series, Social Sciences for a World in Crisis. Info on how to learn more about the series and view previous episodes will be coming on your screen in just a few seconds. So I'd like to thank our panelists. I'd like to thank everybody involved. This has been a wonderfully informative and inspiring session. So from my undisclosed location on the East Coast right now, I send my greetings Thanks and just a deep appreciation to our panelists for the work they're doing. And I, as a citizen and as a journalist, hope to learn much more from what you've done. Thanks. Thank you, everybody, so much.
Narrator: That was James Fallows, Corey Fields, David Grusky, and Hazel Marcus discussing The Voices of Americans in Crisis. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.stanford.edu, or you can find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. We've got more original interviews with renowned fellows from CASBS history coming up in the Human Centered feed. So be sure to follow us in your podcast app of choice. You don't wanna miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.