The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research has primary responsibility for three groups of data: United States Information Agency (USIA) surveys conducted around the world between 1949 and 1999, surveys from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and all other surveys for which the Roper Center has reports but lacks the original data.

The USIA conducted several thousand surveys in scores of countries around the world. While these included many in Western Europe, also gathered were survey data from areas in which they were otherwise scarce, among them a number of nations in Southeast Asia and Africa. These surveys focused on views of the United States and its foreign policies but touched on many other topics as well. The USIA often asked identical questions in different countries, providing a valuable resource for comparative analysis.

The Roper Center already holds several hundred USIA surveys, but many more—probably over a thousand—are preserved in the National Archives. While the surveys at the National Archives are secure, they lack effective finding aids and conversion to modern formats, making it difficult for researchers to make use of the data. The Roper Center plans to catalog and process this important collection so it is readily available to the public.

The National Opinion Research Center began in the early 1940s, making it one of the oldest survey organizations, and it has conducted many important studies over the ensuing sixty years. NORC has always donated data to the Roper Center, but many of its surveys did not find their way there or into any other archives. Sometimes the data were given to the survey sponsor, and sometimes they were simply set aside and forgotten. Fortunately, some data have been preserved in boxes and filing cabinets stored in a warehouse near NORC's Chicago headquarters. There is little organization, and many of the boxes have no external indication of their contents; but the NORC librarian has been able to ascertain that at least eighty surveys that have not been archived are probably preserved in the warehouse.

Several of these datasets are already well known to social scientists, such as the early studies of occupational prestige from the 1940s and 1950s. Others, although less familiar, are of interest because they provide information on important topics. For example, during the early 1960s, NORC did a number of studies of happiness and mental well-being. These questions were not prominent in social science research at the time, but they have become more popular in recent years, so that the NORC data provide an important baseline for historical comparison. There are also many other NORC studies whose location is unknown—they may be in the warehouse, or at other locations, or lost entirely. The NORC library has preserved codebooks and correspondence related to each study, and we are hoping that further examination of these records will shed light on their location.