Editor’s note: Each week, the San Antonio Report publishes a brief synopsis of the weekly bigcitysmalltown podcast hosted by Robert Rivard, co-founder of the Report.
UTSA wants to know what is on Bexar County residents’ minds. The university’s new Center for Public Opinion Research (CPOR) is conducting polls, surveys and other projects to gather data from San Antonians on a variety of issues.
In a conversation with Robert Rivard on the bigcitysmalltown podcast, CPOR’s inaugural director Dr. Bryan Gervais shares how the research center came to be and its future goals for Bexar County.
Initial conversations for the research center began around 2020, and after a few years of planning, CPOR was formally established at UTSA in the fall of 2023.
“We finally had a little bit of funding to operate at the start of this year… So, we jumped into it right away,” Gervais said. “Our first goal was to get a pilot poll in before Super Tuesday… and we did.”
A pilot poll was conducted before March 5, and ahead of the November election, the research center conducted another three local voter polls to gather opinions on presidential candidates, amendments to city charters, and also to gain insight into the upcoming 2025 mayoral election. Reports detailing the results of those polls can be found on UTSA’s website.
CPOR will soon release a report on an recent poll they conducted during early voting.
Gervais says that one of UTSA’s main goals through the research center is “developing what we’re calling our Bexar County panel which we aim to be a representative group of folks, representative of Bexar County who do surveys for us over time.”
The goal is for the panel to consist of 5,000 randomly selected residents who will be surveyed over time, helping track local attitudes on financial stability, health issues, housing affordability, opinions on schools and education and emergency preparedness.
“I’m really excited to develop this panel and expand these projects because I think it’s going to be a wealth of information about our populace that can inform organizations… [and] policy makers about the main concerns of voters, their perspectives, their insights,” Gervais said. “And tracking this over time really lets us know whether or not things are getting better or worse or people’s perspectives are changing on these things.”
UTSA is modeling their research center on others like the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Research done by the Kinder Institute’s research has done a lot to foster change in Houston and Harris County.
Gervais says that access to residents’ opinions and perspectives has lead “to actionable policy by local government there. And we hope to try to replicate that here,” Gervais added, because Bexar County derserves that.
