Centers and Projects
The Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project
Website: http://mpip.temple.edu/mpip/
The Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project, funded by the William Penn Foundation, aims to promote regional thinking about our most important challenges by illuminating conditions and trends in our nine county region (defined as the central cities of Philadelphia and Camden along with the Pennsylvania counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery, and the New Jersey counties of Burlington, Camden, Gloucester and Salem). To promote regional thinking, MPIP maintains and updates a set of social, economic, and environmental indicators that protray the quality of life in the region's communities, offering analyses of these indicators in occasional web reports and an annual report. From 2003-2005, MPIP and Temple's Institute for Survey Research also conducted annual 1,000 random digit-dialing household surveys of perceptions of quality of life, permitting comparison of perceptions with actual conditions.
Website: http://www.temple.edu/isr
Founded in 1967, Temple University Institute for Survey Research is one
of the oldest and most prestigious academic survey research centers in
the U.S., with more than 40 years of experience conducting national,
state, and local surveys, statistical research, focus group research,
needs assessments, and program evaluations.
They collaborate with faculty and other researchers around the country
on surveys and evaluations across a broad range of fields, topics and
populations.
Pennsylvania Policy Database Project
Website: http://www.temple.edu/papolicy/
The Pennsylvania Policy Database Project is a free, online resource that provides access to more than 160,000 state and news media records and enables users to trace and analyze with a few mouse clicks the history of public policy in the Commonwealth since 1979. Designed for easy use by educators, students, researchers, policy makers, news reporters, and the general public, it is the first comprehensive state policy database of its kind.
The project was built by Temple University and five other universities with the support and cooperation of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Also participating were Pennsylvania State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania project is modeled on the national Policy Agendas database (www.policyagendas.org), which allows users to track and analyze federal policy since 1946. Created by political scientists Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones and funded by the National Science Foundation, the national project is housed at the University of Texas. Similar databases are under construction in a dozen foreign countries (www.comparativeagendas.org at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
The Center on Regional Politics- Coming Soon
Website: http://www.temple.edu/ipa/corp
Temple University’s Center on Regional Politics (CORP) will provide
elected federal, state, and local officials and private sector and
non-profit leaders within the five-county region (Bucks, Chester,
Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia) with a forum to seek consensus
on policies to improve the quality of life and economic opportunities
for residents of Southeastern Pennsylvania. CORP’s mission is to provide
the neutral ground and intellectual resources that a university can
offer to encourage and support interaction among leaders
throughoutSoutheastern Pennsylvania, with the goal of developing
evidence-based policies that respond to the region’s needs and promote
its broad civic and economic interests. As indicated by its name, the
center will have as a special focus the politics of public policy, or
identifying the most promising practical strategies to achieve optimal
policy results. The center will not advocate or lobby for specific
policy measures but will provide the region’s leaders with options and
recommendations for addressing issues that incorporate assessments of
both policy impact and political feasibility. Toward this end, the
center will produce and sponsor policy research and conduct educational
seminars, legislative briefings, quiet discussions, and open forums to
improve public understanding of problems and opportunities confronting
the region and to encourage collaboration among leaders across
partisan lines, economic sectors, and jurisdictional boundaries. The
center will work cooperatively with other organizations with public
policy missions to maximize the efficient use of scarce resources for
the overall benefit of the region.
Established in 1975, the Social Science Data Library serves as Temple University's centralized, interdisciplinary repository for computerized social science data and expertise in the analysis of such data .