HNDS-I: Collaborative Research: Developing a Data Platform for Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations

非营利组织是美国经济和社会福祉的重要贡献者。在医疗保健、儿童保育、教育、职业培训和许多其他领域，非营利组织为公众服务，降低政府成本，改善日常生活。每天都有数百万人与非营利组织互动。然而，尽管这些重要的角色，收集和共享数据的高成本阻碍了对非营利组织及其对社会的集体贡献的更好理解。这个名为“非营利组织研究小组项目（NORPP）经理”的项目将创建一个可公开访问的、基于互联网的合作研究平台，以降低收集和共享大量高质量的、多年来有关非营利组织及其影响的数据的成本。该平台将加强研究和评估，扩大对数据密集型研究的获取，促使组织、政策制定者和资助者做出更科学的决策，并改善他们所服务的社区的成果。NORPP平台将提供三个主要功能。首先，工具和自动化流程将允许研究人员在全国范围内、跨社区、州和地区招募和培养具有代表性的非营利组织样本，并使用一种通用的方法。该平台将自动化系统采样和加权程序，以确保使用该平台的研究具有代表性，并且通过自动化样本中组织之间的信息流，它将减少研究人员的其他成本。它还将允许公众在研究和实践社区中下载具有全国代表性的数据，在平台内建立额外的项目特定样本，添加原始调查工具并收集原始数据。其次，NORPP管理器将支持平台内开发的数据与IRS表格990数据以及向IRS提交的501(c)(3)非营利组织人口中组织的其他可用数据的合并，包括有关组织社区和外部环境的地理编码数据，这些数据可从人口普查和其他来源公开获得。第三，NORPP管理器将作为一个协作存储库来管理核心和补充问卷库，以促进复制研究，提高测量的内容有效性，并允许在非营利组织研究中使用一致的测量量表。这项工作将大大降低抽样、联系和调查非营利组织的成本，从而提高非营利组织研究的效率，并将这些数据与现有数据合并，以促进与非营利组织研究交叉的许多社会科学学科中严谨、数据密集型研究的发展。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Nonprofit organizations are important contributors to the US economy and social well-being. Across a wide range of domains, such as healthcare, childcare, education, job training, and many others, nonprofit organizations serve the public, reduce the costs of government, and improve daily lives. Millions of individuals interact with nonprofit organizations every day. Yet despite these important roles, the high costs of collecting and sharing data have prevented a greater understanding of nonprofit organizations and their collective contributions to society. This project, the Nonprofit Organization Research Panel Project (NORPP) Manager, will create a publicly-accessible, internet-based, and collaborative research platform that will lower the costs of collecting and sharing large amounts of high-quality, multiyear data on nonprofits and their impacts. The platform will strengthen research and evaluation, broaden access to data-intensive research, and lead to more scientifically informed decision-making by organizations, policymakers, and funders and to improved outcomes for the communities they serve.The NORPP platform will offer three primary functions. First, tools and automated processes will allow researchers to recruit and grow representative samples of nonprofit organizations nationally and across communities, states, and regions over time using a common methodology. The platform will automate systematic sampling and weighting procedures to ensure representativeness for studies using the platform, and it will reduce other costs to researchers by automating information flows with organizations in its samples. It will also allow public access among the research and practice communities to download nationally representative data, build additional project-specific samples within the platform, add original survey instruments, and collect original data. Second, the NORPP Manager will support the merger of data developed within the platform with IRS Form 990 Data and other available data on organizations from the population of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that file with the IRS, including geocoded data on organizations’ communities and external environment that are publicly available from Census and other sources. Third, the NORPP Manager will serve as a collaborative repository to manage a bank of core and supplemental questionnaires to facilitate replication studies, improve content validity of measurements, and allow for consistent measurement scales across nonprofit organizational research. This work will increase the efficiency of research on nonprofit organizations by significantly reducing the costs to sample, contact, and survey nonprofit organizations, and to merge those data with existing data with the goal of facilitating the growth of rigorous, data-intensive research across the many social science disciplines that intersect with nonprofit organizational research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.