BLUEPRINT / SPRING 19 FEATURE 21
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JEAN MERL IT WAS MAY 2016, well into the campaign that won Donald Trump the presidency, when Lorrie Frasure-Yokley made an ambitious proposal to probe the political behavior of Americans more deeply. Instead of competing with other institutions for grants to produce relatively limited data that researchers keep for their own studies, Frasure-Yokley suggested creating a nationwide, cooperative, cost-sharing survey that includes more than just one or two racial or ethnic groups. “I knew 2016 was going to be consequential,” she said during a recent interview in her tidy, narrow office in Bunche Hall. Pale peach walls and family photos softened the fixtures of academia — books and stacks of papers. “We needed quality data from large samples across several major racial and ethnic groups,” she said, “not just a large sample of one group and small samples of other groups.” Frasure-Yokley, an associate professor of political science and African American Studies at UCLA, had been co-principal investigator of the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) of 2008 and 2012, the first multi racial, multi-ethnic, multi lingual post-presidential election studies of racial and political preferences and behavior.
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Now she wanted to step things up and greatly broaden the research for the upcoming election. By enabling participation from professors at colleges and universities around the country, it would be possible to collect much bigger samples of various racial and ethnic groups. It also would open access to high-quality data to everyone, enabling even smaller institutions with fewer resources to contribute to a growing body of research. “It was a crazy idea,” Frasure-Yokley said, with a laugh. “That’s not usually the way scholars conduct themselves. But I kept pushing.” Her effort resulted in the ground breaking 2016 CMPS, unique in its size and reach. She served as co-principal investigator, along with Matt Barreto (UCLA), Janelle Wong (University of Maryland) and Edward Vargas (Arizona State University). Eighty-six social scientists at 55 schools contributed to building its collaborative dataset by purchasing questions. Researchers from larger, better-funded institutions participated, along with scholars from smaller colleges and universities with less income. The survey probed the attitudes of more than 10,000 voters and non-voters about candidates, immigration, policing, equality and experiences with racial discrimination. It contained 394 questions in five languages — English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese — and it took 43 minutes, on average, to complete.
