Since its inception, OPR has been at the forefront of generating new sources of large-scale data to expand our understanding of human populations here and around the world, and developing cutting edge, innovative methods for statistical, demographic, qualitative and mixed methods analysis.

New data produced by current OPR associates include the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project to understand the processes drawing migrants primarily from the developing world to developed countries, particularly the United States, the The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing that for more than two decades has been following a cohort of nearly 5,000 U.S.-born children from low-income and minority families that are at a high risk of breaking up and living in poverty, more than 5,500 hours of in-home video on parent-child interactions aimed at understanding how parents support their children’s early learning, and large-scale surveys in Guatemala on the determinants of illness and health care choices and in Taiwan on health among older persons.

Current research in advancing the study of methods has included randomized controlled trials, the development of theoretical models to investigate the population dynamics of infectious diseases, new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences and, in particular, tools that facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression and propensity score analysis, and social network studies of hidden populations.