Institute of Sociology and Center for Survey Research, Academia Sinica

The Institute of Sociology and the Center for Survey Research are both part of Academia Sinica, a government-funded research academy comprising 26 institutes in the humanities and the physical, life, and social sciences. The Institute of Sociology engages in empirical studies that employ sampling survey as a major research tool, while the Center for Survey Research serves as Academia Sinica’s survey agency. In addition to conducting phone surveys with a CATI system, fielding face-to-face surveys with 35 area supervisors and 200 interviewers, the Center for Survey Research also archives over 600 academic survey data sets. Although neither the Institute of Sociology nor the Center for Survey Research was founded until the mid-1990s, some of their researchers have been conducting various surveys for Academia Sinica since the 1970s. In 1984 they launched Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSCS), a long-term, nationwide, cross-sectional survey. The Institute of Sociology and the Center for Survey Research now jointly field TSCS, which operates two surveys per year and rotates each major module every five years. As of 2001, TSCS has completed 28 separate surveys comprising more than 60,000 interviews. The ISSP modules will be incorporated into this long-term TSCS project.