Collaborative Research: U.S. institutions after COVID-19: Trust, accountability, and public perceptions

COVID-19 upended social, economic, and political systems throughout the world. The United States has faced particular challenges due to its heterogeneity and federal nature. The COVID States project is a large-scale data collection that includes over-time data from diverse state-level samples. The project tracks state-level post-pandemic recovery, studying topics such as trust in institutions, information acquisition and impact, accountability, and economic inequality. It also documents how federal and state policies affect the populace when it comes to these topics. Further, the COVID States project provides access to researchers from all backgrounds, types of academic institutions, and career stages through a competition for survey module time and provides a user-friendly website with data trackers for use by researchers, students, journalists, policymakers, and the public. The COVID States project conducts over-time state-level surveys from all 50 states and D.C. Each survey includes up to 30,000 total respondents, using quota sampling by state. This allows for generalizable inferences at the state and national levels. Post-pandemic data provide an unprecedented opportunity for novel over-time and across-space research designs. The project over-samples demographic minority respondents to facilitate study of heterogeneous social groups. This includes data on trust in political figures and institutions, knowledge and information, political evaluations, behavioral adaptation, physical health, economic well-being, mental health, and more. It also contains detailed social network batteries that allow for the study of inter-household and inter-group transmission of health and information. This is complemented by Twitter data from survey respondents who allow it. This enables the project to identify information sharing and study political discourse. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.