Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) supported by a 2001 NSF Social and Behavioral Sciences Infrastructure grant was organized to encourage the collective enterprise of producing policy-relevant scientific research, as well as to benefit individual research agendas within the scientific community. TESS uses a new methodology that combines experimental design with large-scale population surveys. To date, it has produced over 100 original peer-reviewed studies for social scientists. The scope of the TESS is open to any area of scientific research, as long as the study involved an original contribution to knowledge. In this project TESS will stimulate research on risk communication and its effects on disaster preparedness; government and individual attributions of responsibility and perceived responsiveness; and inter-group threat and cooperation. Using this existing infrastructure platform, TESS will stimulate research on these topics among the best social scientists in the country, while also providing them with the tools needed to execute methodologically sophisticated studies related to homeland security. The organizational framework will allow researchers with studies relevant to homeland security and disaster preparedness to collect high quality data designed with investigator hypotheses framing the data collection. More broadly, TESS will engage its well established and expanding constituency of users (from Political Science, Psychology, Economics, Social, Public Policy, Public Health, Cognitive Sciences and Communication Research) in research on pressing questions relating to homeland security and how to ensure the future safety of Americans..
