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t m c » p u l s e | d e c 2 0 1 7 /ja n 2 0 1 8 8 Spotlight STEPHEN KLINEBERG, PH.D., is a professor of sociology at Rice University and founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. In 1982, he and his students launched the annual Kinder Houston Area Survey to track shifts in demographic patterns, economic outlooks, beliefs and experiences of Harris County residents. Klineberg will publish a book in 2019 about this ongoing research. Q | You were raised and educated in the Northeast, earning your Ph.D. from Harvard University. What brought you to Houston and why have you made it your home? A | Rice University brought me here, initially. When I came in the '70s, I didn't like Houston very much. It was a very business-dominated city. Everyone was congratulating themselves on how much money they were making in the oil business, with no attention being paid to public spaces. So what if it's ugly! Who cares if it smells! It's the smell of money! But Rice was wonderful. My wife was finishing law school, so we said we'll come for a couple of years. And then I got to like Rice more and more and I got to like the city better— and it turned out to be a fascinating and consequential city in America with the collapse of the oil boom and the recovery in the 21st century. Q | Why did you launch the survey in 1982 and why have you continued to do it? A | It was a one-time survey; it never occurred to us to do it again. I was teaching a research methods class to sociology majors and I do survey research, so I thought, I'll have them get their hands dirty. Houston was this booming metropolis with growing concerns about traffic, pollution, crime. What kind of city are we building with all of this affluence? I figured, let's do a survey on the social costs of growth. What happens to all of the other aspects of life when your total commit- ment is to make as much money as fast as you can? We did the survey, analyzed the data and it showed some very inter- esting kinds of patterns. And then two months later, the oil boom collapsed. One hundred thousand jobs were lost in Houston by the end of 1983, in a city that had known nothing but economic boom from its beginning. So we said, we better do this survey again. Q | Are there any significant changes the survey has charted over the past 35 years? A | Two things have changed. One is increasingly positive attitudes toward immigration and diversity, and the other is increasing support for gay rights. We can now ask the question: Did that change occur because people changed their minds, or is it because new, younger folk are coming into the world with different views than us older folk? And we can answer that question because we have been asking these questions since the '90s, so we can fol- low the baby boomers. And the answer is they have not changed their minds. They see those things the same as they did 20 years ago. What has changed dramatically is younger Anglos coming of age in the last 10 years are experi- encing a different reality than us old Anglos who came of age in the '60s and '70s. Q | How is the survey conducted? A | We do the survey over the phone. It is a random sampling of Harris County residents. We weight the data at the end, because we know the percentage of African-Americans, Latinos and Asians in Harris County. We know levels of education, we know ages from the census, so we can weight the result. No matter what we do, we are going to oversample older Anglos who are at home and happy to talk to you, and miss out and undersample younger Latinos who are more likely to have cell phones. So you weight the data. You get a little extra weight if you are Latino and young. And the overall picture comes out to be very close to what you would expect it to be. Q | Technology has changed a lot since you started this survey. Has that made collecting data easier or more challenging? A | It was a whole lot easier 30 years ago. Everybody had landline phones. It was none of this caller ID or answer- ing machines. The phone rings, you answer the damn phone! We were get- ting 80 percent response rates. But now, the response rates have gone down dramatically, not because people refuse to answer the questions, but because they refuse to pick up the phone for anybody. The response rates have dropped to 30-35 percent. Q | After analyzing the results of the survey, how do you think Houston could improve? A | All of the growth after 1982—after the collapse of the oil boom—has been the influx of African-Americans, Latinos and Asians. And this biracial, southern city dominated by white men has become the single most ethnically diverse city in the country. If Houston is going to make it, we all understand it has got to become a destination of choice, a place where the best and the brightest people in America who can live anywhere will say, 'I want to live in Houston, Texas.' Q | How have the city's shifting demographics impacted education, the economy and the workforce? A | We are in the midst of an epic transformation, where 76 million babies who were born in that incredible period after World War II have been this bulge rattling through the American system. The leading edge of those 76 million babies turns 71 this year, and we are going to watch a literal doubling of the number of Americans over 65 every day between now and 2030. And they are being replaced by a very different gen- eration. Instead of being an amalgam of European nationalities, we will be a microcosm of the world—nowhere more clearly seen than in Houston. (continued) Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 2014. "Recovery: Job Growth and Education Requirements through 2020." Retrieved from cew.georgetown.edu/recovery2020, on July 27, 2015.