What's Next

We have big plans for The People Say! Learn more below about our goals for developing this platform and how we plan to expand it to include more populations or topics. To discuss opportunities to develop new research with our team or to use a version of The People Say to house your research, please fill out our Request for Expressions of Interest—we’ll get back to you quickly!

Longitudinal and Expanded Research with Older Adults

An important next step for this work is to conduct subsequent rounds of research with our participants. We believe that tracking the evolving needs of older adults over time will generate important insights into persistent and/or recurrent challenges that can be addressed by policymakers.

We're also interested in expanding our research pool, both to add additional geographic locations and to include additional populations of interest, such as older adults living in residential-care settings, older adults in need of at-home care, older adults who are/have been homeless, Indigenous older adults, and/or formerly incarcerated older adults.

Public Civic Research with Other Populations

We developed The People Say with a focus on older adults—but also to demonstrate the potential for public, prospective, longitudinal civic research.

We're interested in applying the same approach to developing other longitudinal research studies with populations of interest, such as moms (re: prenatal, birth, and post-partum experiences and services) and working families (re: access to healthcare/benefits, job quality, education/training opportunities, social connection, and other aspects of economic mobility), or in other specific geographies, such as New York City or Michigan.

Contact us if you're interested in partnering to develop new research using The People Say's approach to qualitative civic research.

Extending the Platform to Other Civic Researchers

In addition to using the platform to house research conducted by the Public Policy Lab or for The SCAN Foundation, we also want to support other civic researchers with a commitment to high-quality, ethical design research to make use of the platform, creating a kind of 'GitHub for civic research'—a repository for the work of multiple civic researchers. Options we're interested in exploring include both adding other research data to the existing The People Say data set and creating new public data sets that use the same platform infrastructure.

Contact us if you're interested in partnering to use The People Say as a platform for your public-interest research.