In a special issue of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal in 2024, David Grusky and collaborators make the case for a new national platform for real-time qualitative interviewing. Drawing on the American Voices Project—thousands of in-depth interviews across the U.S.—they show how systematically collected qualitative data can surface emerging problems in real time, such as childcare shortages, fentanyl use, and new forms of economic rebellion and disaffection.

The article shows that public-use immersive interviews can not only be used to track social changes that surveys miss but also to serve as a testbed for a new form of cumulative, large-N, and nationally-representative qualitative interviewing. The article concludes by laying out how this platform for directly “listening to the voices of America” could become a permanent feature of the country’s social science toolkit.