Rensis Likert and Angus Campbell came to the University of Michigan and assembled colleagues who had worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Division of Program Surveys (DPS) during World War II to start the Survey Research Center (SRC). The newcomers—George Katona, Charles Cannell, Leslie Kish, and Daniel Katz—arrived by 1947.

The Survey Research Center and the Research Center for Group Dynamics joined on Feb. 1 to form the Institute for Social Research, launching the nation's leading academic laboratory for social science research. The new enterprise, said University of Michigan President Alexander Ruthven, would more effectively "bring to bear quantitative and experimental research methods on complex and important social problems."

The Survey Methodology Program (SMP) was established within SRC with the explicit aim of creating a multidisciplinary team to focus on research methodology.  Thus, the SMP draws upon a range of disciplines including social psychology, cognitive psychology, sociology, statistics, and computer science.

The Joint Program in Survey Methodology begins its collaboration between the universities of Maryland and Michigan and Westat, a Maryland-based survey organization, is the nation's oldest and largest graduate training program in the principles and practices of survey research. Sponsored, in part, by a consortium of US federal statistical agencies, and taught by leading faculty at ISR and Maryland, the program is targeted at producing the next generation of survey researchers, statisticians, and methodologists.

Program in Survey Methodology starts in order to train future generations of survey methodologists who specialize in the statistical, social, and data sciences. The program offers Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Science degrees through the University of Michigan.

James Lepkowski has been on the faculty of Biostatistics and the Institute for Social Research since 1982, conducting research on survey sampling and estimation as well as teaching courses on sampling, surveys, and related topics. As the founding program director, James has always had a love for students and was always seeking to provide research support to MPSDS MS and PhD students. He was SMP's Director from 2001-2012.

Frederick is a Research Professor in MPSDS and Professor in Psychology. His research applies ideas and methods from cognitive science and human-computer interaction to data collection methods. His current research concerns efficiency of texting compared to voice (telephone) interviews, understanding when social media content might be able to supplement or even replace certain survey data, the prevalence of acquiescence in survey response and pretesting, and moment-to-moment measurement of music listening experience.

The Program in Survey Methodology (PSM) changes its name to the Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science (MPSDS).

Sunghee Lee is our third and current Director of Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science, formally known as Program in Survey Methodology. Sunghee is a Research Professor in MPSD and holds a PhD from the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. Before joining the Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science, she served as Survey Methodologist for California Health Interview Survey and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Biostatistics at UCLA. Her research interest includes sampling and measurement issues in data collection with linguistic and racial minorities as well as hard-to-reach populations and cross-cultural survey methodology.

MPSDS celebrates 20 years with over 100 community members attending the festivities. The keynote speakers included ISR director Kate Cagney, two former SRC directors, Jim House and Bob Groves (the five most recent SRC directors attended), two alumni of the program, Frost Hubbard (MS 2006) and Rachel Levenstein (PhD 2010), and founding program director, Jim Lepkowski. The speakers recounted the origins of the program within SRC and ISR, especially in the Survey Methodology (research) Program whose mission of conducting research spanning the cultures within SRC (Sampling, Field, and Coding sections) became the training mission of MPSDS; the speakers also emphasized the program’s interdependence with the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland; and they celebrated the program’s growth. Jim Lepkowski recalled that in the first year of the program “we admitted three students; two came;” this year, the program received 103 applications to the MS program, and after the 2023 commencement the program will have awarded 157 MS degrees, 33 PhDs, and 27 graduate certificates. It was unanimous: the future of the program is bright, and it was a very happy birthday party.