Mission

The Public Policy Research Lab is dedicated to quality public policy research through state-of-the-art survey technologies. It helps advance scholarly and practical research while playing a leadership role in state and national public policy development. The lab serves other units on campus, government agencies, non-profits, business and industry. National surveys have resulted in publication in both practical and scholarly journals. The lab's projects benefit from the multiple disciplines and intellectual assets at LSU.

One of the lab’s core projects is the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs’ annual Louisiana Survey, a longitudinal study of advancements and regressions of citizen views regarding state services and contemporary issues.

The Media Effects Lab is a state of the art experimental lab equipped with 16 computer stations and a living room area for research in a more natural environment. Researchers can measure audiences’ physical responses (heart rate, blood pressure, eye movement and brain activity) to various media messages as well as gather their attitudes toward those messages. Experiments and projects track people’s responses to particular media content: what stimulates them; what doesn’t; what images they pay attention to; which ones don’t resonate. Specific software measures user interactivity and responses to news Websites and social networking sites. Unconscious attitudes can also be measured.