IPOL Restoring Historic Iowa Polls

The PPC was pleased to support the Iowa Policy and Opinion Lab (IPOL) in entering and analyzing data from some recently unearthed Iowa Polls from the 1940's through the 1980's. The polls were discovered in the archives of Tom Mans, a 1981 UI Political Science PhD. The collection included boxes of questionnaires for nearly 100 surveys between 1948 and 1981.

In the Fall of 2022, IPOL students digitized an entire survey from scans of the printouts and entered the data from Iowa Poll 249 collected in 1981. During the Spring semester, they began analyzing some of the survey questions relating to race, constitutional rights, teaching Iowa history, and the Iowa caucuses. 

Read one of their reports here.