Last year, Julie Lee, assistant professor of health management and policy in the College of Public Health and CSSI researcher affiliate, was an awardee of CSSI’s inaugural Surveying the Social World initiative. Now, she is using the survey data to explore how public perceptions of healthcare affordability and quality impact support for public health initiatives, such as vaccination programs and quitting smoking campaigns, and how individual health attitudes and behaviors shape those views.

The University of Iowa’s Center for Social Science Innovation (CSSI) in the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) awarded two University of Iowa researchers the Surveying the Social World (SSW) opportunity, a competitive program that provides UI researchers with funding and support to collect high-quality, nationally representative survey data from 1,000 U.S. adults.

A new University of Iowa study found that mental illness is linked to violence overall, but not specifically to firearm violence or mass shootings. Mark Berg, professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology and director of CSSI, led the study. Co-authors include Andrew Krajewski, Yi-Fang Lu, postdoctoral research scholar at CSSI, and Ethan Rogers, associate director of CSSI.

Brian Ekdale, professor of journalism and mass communication in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been selected for the 2026-2027 CSSI Faculty Research Fellowship. Ekdale will be advancing his project "Outliers and Amplifiers: Understanding How People and Platforms Drive Political Polarization."

CSSI’s research services team is helping researchers focus on what they do best – social science. Whether they’re assisting University of Iowa faculty in refining their project proposal, helping them navigate administrative components of the research process, or designing and executing web and telephone surveys, they help relieve the administrative burden that comes with research.