Founded in 1947 by Elmo Roper, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research continues to play a crucial role in the advancement of the field of public opinion research. The Center’s mission is to collect, preserve, and disseminate public opinion data; to serve as a resource to help improve the practice of survey research; and to broaden the understanding of public opinion through the use of survey data in the United States and around the world. The digital archive, also known as Roper iPoll, includes data from as early as 1935 and offers users nearly 800,000 questions and more than 25,000 datasets, expanding daily as questions and surveys are added to study records. In addition to Roper iPoll the Center retains a physical collection in its offices on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY. A 501 (c)(3), non-profit, the Roper Center is hosted at Cornell University.
With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Center is developing a Health Poll Database. The goals of this database are multiple: to make the health questions publicly accessible, to make trends easy to find and use, to assist researchers in finding the questions they are interested in by applying topic tags to individual question, and to educate users on the relationships between different aspects of health and health policy.