The Pew Charitable Trusts is known for data-driven work and embraces integrity as a driving principle behind its research. This means that when Pew decides to tackle a problem—whether it’s the lack of available housing, the need for retirement savings, how to help protect ocean species, or some 40 other project areas—it makes every effort to provide rigorous research and recommendations that are grounded in data and science. Pew’s research is supported by a unit of trained researchers—the research quality and support (RQS) team—whose job is to ensure that every Pew study meets high standards of methodological rigor, transparency, and ethical integrity.
In a typical research process, quality control happens at the end. After a study is designed, the data collected, and a report drafted, the publication is then sent for peer review or internal signoff, with quality considered a final checkpoint.
Pew flips that usual model around. The RQS team is embedded at every stage of the research and works collaboratively with experts across the organization. This helps to ensure that every project is built on a solid methodological foundation—one that asks the right research questions; reaches the right people, groups, states, or nations; and selects the best approach for the goals at hand. The RQS team helps to design the research carefully from the start and to consider what approach would best serve the intended inquiry. Would in-depth interviews, focus groups, or something else be most appropriate?
An example of how RQS helps to strengthen Pew’s research can be found in the team’s work with Pew’s housing policy initiative team. The housing team explores how regulations contribute to housing shortages and rising costs and what policymakers can do to create more options for housing affordability—one of the nation’s most pressing challenges. Part of that work involves understanding how people finance homes. When standard mortgages aren’t available, people often turn to alternative financing loans, which can expose them to higher risk and come with few consumer protections.
Manufactured home residents are particularly vulnerable. Many rely on loans with higher rates and fewer protections than mortgages, such as personal property loans. And when those aren’t available, some buyers turn to contract financing, which can involve limited transparency, balloon payments, loss of equity in cases of default, and the responsibility to pay taxes and insurance without full ownership.
To help measure the scale of this issue, the housing team turned to RQS survey experts. Together they designed a survey that captured highly technical financing details in ways the general public could accurately understand and relay.
Because many borrowers don’t know the formal name of their type of loan, survey questions had to be carefully crafted to help respondents clearly identify their situation. To accomplish this, RQS listened to what the housing team wanted to learn, wrote questions that would shed light on this important and niche population, and found the right vendor who could interview enough respondents (1,200) to make the analysis meaningful. Collaboration here was key.
In addition, RQS was able to translate complex housing finance structures into accessible survey language and also interpret the results. This allowed the housing team to produce reliable national estimates—and give policymakers a clearer picture of how many Americans use alternative financing with limited protections, and why it matters.
The housing team has also worked to assess the safety of single-stairway multifamily buildings as tall as six floors. Such apartments are already more affordable than single-family homes. The team’s research shows that single-staircase designs don’t compromise fire safety, but they do reduce building costs by 6% to 13% compared with buildings with requirements for two staircases. These construction savings also create more affordable housing options.
A key part of this safety assessment was comparing fire fatalities in single-stairway versus multistairway buildings. This proved to be a complex undertaking: Working with RQS, the housing team built a methodology that draws on publicly available databases and includes a review of every fire fatality recorded in jurisdictions permitting single-stairway buildings—examining, in each case, whether the building’s stairway configuration was a contributing factor. As with all housing research, RQS provided quality assurance on the analysis and ensured that the published findings were rigorously vetted.
Summing up the collaboration, housing project director Alex Horowitz said, “There’s a reason no one had ever hand-coded more than a decade of fire fatalities before, but RQS provided close guidance and several research assistants so we could better understand how building design and fire safety interact.” The result was a win on two fronts—improving affordability and reducing fire deaths.
This has helped Pew to produce research that is consistent, stands up to scrutiny, and is often referenced by policymakers.
Krista Jenkins, Ph.D., is project director and Carrie Hritz, Ph.D., is director of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ research quality and support team. Between them, they have some 35 years of experience in applied research.
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