Two labs in the Department of Political Science at Florida Atlantic: one that measures what the public thinks, and one that puts students to work answering questions for local partners.
The PolCom Lab
The Political Communication and Public Opinion Lab is a joint venture of the Department of Political Science and the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. It investigates public opinion and political trends nationally and, above all, in Florida. I serve as one of its co-directors.
The lab fields multi-mode surveys, combining interactive voice response calling with text-to-online probability sampling, drawing from state registered voter lists and weighting on age, gender, race, education, and past voting behavior. In partnership with Mainstreet Research USA, its FAU/Mainstreet polls of Florida and national races are released publicly and are widely covered in the state and national press. The lab also fields private surveys for clients inside and outside the university.
Polling infrastructure of this kind at a public university is rarer than it should be, and it is available to people who need to know something the existing data will not tell them.
Commissioning a survey
If your organization has a question about public opinion, public sentiment, consumer research, or an election, the lab can design and field a survey to answer it. That includes the many organizations that simply need defensible numbers about their own community — a chamber of commerce, a hospital system, a school district, a municipality. Write to me at burnettc@fau.edu, or reach the lab directly through faupolling.com.
The Problem Solving Lab
A semester-length, client-facing research studio. Small teams of undergraduates work with local partners — nonprofits, local governments, citizen groups — to answer real policy questions.
Each team pairs a faculty advisor and a graduate student lead with ten to fifteen undergraduates. Over a semester the team scopes the question with the partner, gathers and builds the data, and does the analysis using modern analytic tools, including AI models and the resources of the PolCom Lab.
Every project ends with the same four deliverables:
- A white paper
- An executive brief
- A reproducible methods appendix
- A public briefing delivered to the partner
The methods appendix matters as much as the findings. A partner should be able to hand the work to someone else and have them reproduce it — and a student should be able to hand it to an employer and show exactly what they did.
Why it exists
Partners receive actionable, nonpartisan analysis they could not otherwise commission. A county nonprofit or a small municipality rarely has the budget for a consulting engagement, and the questions they need answered are often exactly the questions political science is equipped to take on.
Students get the other half of the bargain: portfolio-ready work, a real client, a deadline that belongs to someone else, and applied experience — the difference between studying policymaking and practicing it.
Experiential learning at the center of the curriculum, and research that produces solutions for the communities we live in.
For partners
If your organization has a policy question that would benefit from careful, nonpartisan analysis — a program evaluation, a survey, a look at what comparable jurisdictions have done, a data problem you have not had time to sit with — I would like to hear about it. The best projects are concrete, matter to a real decision, and can be scoped to a single semester. Write to me at burnettc@fau.edu with a short description of the question.
For students
Lab teams are open to political science majors and to students from other departments whose skills fit a given project. No prior research experience is required; a willingness to learn the tools and to be accountable to a client is. Email me or stop by the department to ask about the current cycle.
For supporters
The Lab needs two things: operational support for graduate team leads, faculty time, software and data access, and the partner engagement that keeps a pipeline of real clients — and a dedicated collaborative research space with configurable work areas, conferencing capacity for partner briefings, and computing that can handle real analysis. Departments are made of people, but they are held together by the spaces they occupy. If you would like to talk about supporting the Lab, please get in touch.