Starting in fall 2022, IPOL has been working to enter and analyze data from some recently unearthed Iowa Polls from the 1940s through the 1980s. These were discovered in the archives of Tom Mans, a 1981 UI PhD in Political Science. The Iowa Polls were conducted by the Des Moines Register and around 1980 were archived with the Social Sciences Lab at the University of Iowa. They moved around with Tom for years before Mary Kay Mans brought them back to Iowa working with the Iowa Social Science Research Center.

The collection included two boxes of survey questionnaires for nearly 100 survey from 1948 to 1981 and reports along with two tapes on which the data had been stored. We sent the tapes out for data retrieval, but unfortunately nothing useful could be extracted. Fortunately the boxes contained printouts of the entire data set for about two dozen surveys.

In fall 2022 IPOL worked to digitize an entire survey from scans of the printouts. We double entered all the data for Iowa Poll 249 from 1981. This semester we have begun to analyze the questions, including sets relating to race, constitutional rights, teaching Iowa history, and the Iowa Caucuses. Keep an eye out for our report.

Eventually we hope to release the data for public use. We have been working with UI Libraries, who house a collection of later Iowa Polls, and the Des Moines Register, which has been very helpful in sharing information on the Iowa Poll in general as well as specifics related to Iowa Poll #249 to help validate our data entry.