Hugh Gladwin

     Director, Institute for Public Opinion Research, School of Journalism and Communication

     Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

     Florida International University

Hugh Gladwin's undergraduate studies were in philosophy at the Catholic University of America and he studied linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and computer data analysis for the Ph.D. in Anthropology he received from Stanford University in 1970. He has done field work in Ghana, Mexico and the United States. He worked at the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico and the University of California, Irvine, before joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Florida International University in 1981.

In 1984 Gladwin joined J. Arthur Heise in directing IPOR which Heise had founded the year before. Together they developed IPOR into a survey research center which has greatly assisted getting the voice of the public heard in Florida policy issues and has been a major support to research at FIU. In 1988 IPOR began the FIU/Florida Poll which has become a major and unique resource for tracking Florida public opinion every year since then. IPOR is an institute at FIU under the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. IPOR provides survey research and evaluation services to all FIU units and many clients outside FIU in universities, government, and the private sector.

Since Hurricane Andrew in 1992 Gladwin has been engaged in research on it and other hurricane issues. He is a contributor to and co-editor of the book Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender and the Sociology of Disasters which was published in 1997 by Routledge. He was co-PI on an NSF grant to study South Florida residents' decisions about approaching hurricanes, and PI of another NSF grant to study the perceptions of Gulf Coast residents in evacuations for hurricanes Ivan and Katrina. In 2006 Gladwin joined the the Human Dimensions Group of the Florida Coastal Everglades NSF Long Term Ecological Research Site as a researcher studying urban effects on ecosystem resiliency. He is also a member of the Miami-Dade Climate Change Advisory Task Force.

In addition to directing IPOR, Gladwin has continued four long-term research interests to the extent that his time has allowed:

1. Studying and modeling the public communication of opinions and values. This work includes the development of new survey techniques to meet the changing scene of communications in the US and applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and the internet to survey research.
2. Decision making in culturally diverse settings. A current application of this work is seen in the NSF grants mentioned above. In the past this work has ranged from studying women fish sellers in West Africa to modeling how people choose to buy cars in Southern California.
3. Studying social and political identity in non-patriarchal matrilineal kinship systems.
4. Understanding how culturally important expert skill systems work in areas such as agriculture, environmental and disaster management, mathematics and the arts.

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