Langer Research Associates, in association with the hedge fund Kase Capital, has produced a nationally representative telephone survey on the attitudes of current and former J.C. Penney customers, measuring the extent of customer defections and the company’s prospects of winning them back. See our report here. (The survey’s been covered by in detail by IBD and ValueWalk, as well as pickup by Bloomberg andStreetInsider.)

The Associated Press reported today on a new national survey on long-term care from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, funded by The SCAN Foundation, the country’s leading nonprofit focused solely on long-term care for senior citizens. Langer Research Associates consulted with the foundation in initiating and carrying out the project, and will be producing additional data analysis. See the AP’s report here and the AP-NORC Center’s coverage here.

“Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,” the new book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, quotes a study lead-authored by Julie E. Phelan, senior research analyst at Langer Research Associates, during her doctoral work at Rutgers University.

Sandberg writes: “… a 2008 study by Phelan et al. examined the hiring criteria used to evaluate male and female agentic (highly competent, confident, ambitious) or communal (modest, sociable) managerial job applicants. The results found that evaluators ‘weighted competence more heavily than social skills for all applicants, with the exception of agentic women, whose social skills were given more weight than competence.’ The authors conclude that ‘evaluators shifted the job criteria away from agentic women’s strong suit (competence) and toward their perceived deficit (social skills) to justify discrimination.’”

Julie’s paper, “Competent Yet Out in the Cold: Shifting Criteria for Hiring Reflect Backlash Toward Agentic Women,” was published in theDecember 2008 issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly.

We’ve updated our briefing paper on using social media to estimate public opinion, including new research from the Pew Research Center, Coca-Cola Company, and others. See our report here, and our previous briefing paper on opt-in online panels here.

The (terrific) American Scholar magazine has published our letter to the editor on the niceties of reliable, representative public opinion research, including the question of what in fact constitutes a “poll.” See it here.

On ABC’s “This Week” program today, anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Cardinal Timothy Dolan about our ABC News/Washington Post poll finding that six in 10 American Catholics think the church is out of touch with their views. “Sometimes, by nature, the church has got to be out of touch with concerns, because we’re always supposed to be thinking of the beyond, the eternal, the changeless,” the cardinal replied, adding, “… sometimes there is a disconnect. … And that’s a challenge for us.” See ABC’s coverage of the interview here, and our poll report here. Beyond ABC and the Post, the poll’s been widely reported on outlets including CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, Agence France-Presse, the Huffington Post, Canada Free Press and as far afield as ABC-CBN News in the Philippines.

Our ABC News/Washington Post poll on gay marriage this week was cited in the Obama administration’s reply brief on the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as being reported by news outlets including MSNBC, NPR, the Huffington Post, The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Economist, the LA Times, The Boston Globe, the Atlantic, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, Slate, Politico, the National Journal, The Hill, The New York Post, New York Magazine, the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Detroit Free Press, The Nation, The New York Times, PBS Newshour, NBC News, Newsday, Glamour and (king of them all) the Winnipeg Free Press.

Health Affairs has published a piece by Peter Long, president of Blue Shield of California Foundation, on our ongoing research for the Foundation among long-income Californians on patient engagement and primary care redesign. The same work was cited last month in testimony by Mark Blum, Chief Executive Officer, America’s Agenda Healthcare Education Fund, to the California State Assembly Committee on Health. And Gary Langer gave a presentation on the research Feb. 25 at a roundtable meeting at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C.; see the video link here.

There’s been wide pickup by other media organizations of our ongoing ABC News/Washington Post polls. Recent examples include coverage of our last poll on the president’s personal favorability in the Seattle PI; on gun control in the San Francisco Examiner, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe, UPI, the National Journal, Slate and Concord Monitor; on Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the Baltimore Sun, The Hill, onMSNBC and on Real Clear Politics; on immigration policy in the Huffington Post; on the president’s inauguration in U.S. News and World Reportand the National Journal; and on the recent budget deal in The American Prospect and the Huffington Post.

Counterpart International, a global development nonprofit, has released our survey-based assessment of Support to the Electoral Process (STEP), a civic engagement program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development in which Counterpart and its local partners instructed more than 3.3 million Afghan citizens in the principles of democracy, civil rights, the rule of law and the structure of government.

The report includes an extensive analysis of STEP’s impacts, based on statistical analysis of covariance structure in survey samples of treatment and non-treatment groups in 12 Afghan provinces. If finds that the STEP program had a significant, positive effect on participants’ civic orientation and political and community involvement. The quality of the training sessions, including ratings of teaching materials, topics, instructors and teaching strategies, was a key predictor of successful results, along with security and development levels in the locales in which STEP programs were held.

Findings of the study are contextualized through a detailed review of the literature on best practices in civic education, and the report includes recommendations on how to achieve the maximum positive impact of future civic engagement programs.

Langer Research Associates conducted the literature review, designed the survey questionnaire, analyzed the data and wrote the Counterpart-STEP report, as well as co-designing the sampling plan with D3 Systems Inc., which managed data collection and processing via the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research (ACSOR) in Kabul.

See the study here on Counterpart International’s website.

The Daily, a new national news outlet for tablets and other digital platforms, has posted a nicely produced report on our take on the 2012 election. See it here. (Addendum: The Daily has added a new, post-election piece examining President Obama’s victory, here.)