News Article

iUTAH’s interdisciplinary approach to research creates interesting challenges and opportunities. One of these challenges involved the development of tools for communicating and disseminating the results of social science surveys. In general, survey data are typically interpreted by researchers and communicated with static reports and figures. Members of iUTAH’s social science and cyberinfrastructure teams wanted to expand this approach and develop an interactive, web-based tool that would make the data available to a wider audience. Innovations in methodology, tools, and approach are featured in the October 2016 edition of the journal Environmental Modelling and Software. 

Doug Jackson-Smith, Courtney Flint, and a number of other iUTAH social scientists conducted surveys assessing public attitudes toward water resources in Utah. As the project progressed, a tool was needed to help people visualize and access the results. Amber Jones and Jeff Horsburgh of iUTAH’s cyberinfrastructure team became involved to determine the essential components of the tool. Code was then written by Mauriel Ramirez to create and implement the viewer.

“Most of my past experience has been working with biophysical data,” said Amber Jones, iUTAH data manager and research engineer at Utah State University. “It has been rewarding to work with social scientists and learn about survey data.” The result of this partnership is the survey data viewer, a website that allows direct access to the responses of the 6,000 adults who participated in the iUTAH Utah Water Survey. Questions range from attitudes about local water quality to concerns about environmental conditions. The results can be grouped by home ownership, age, or education level.

“The survey data viewer makes social science data accessible to anyone, and it is interesting to explore patterns in Utahns’ responses,” said Jones. “This collaboration and development wouldn’t have been possible without iUTAH.” Currently, the cyberinfrastructure team is working to apply the tool to additional surveys. This provides a simple interface to communicate the results of surveys to stakeholders, participants, and the general public. One example of how an iUTAH survey is being visualized with the interface and is serving the community can be found here.

Authors of the article include Amber Jones, Jeff Horsburgh, Doug Jackson-Smith, Mauriel Ramirez, Courtney Flint, and Juan Caraballo. The article can be viewed in its entirety under the title A Web-Based, Interactive Visualization Tool For Social Environmental Survey Data.