About
Research that people on every side can trust
I work on complex, contested public questions. I started in the field, with an Indigenous cultural-survival organization in Costa Rica and interviewing young people in San José for University of Costa Rica health studies. Since then my work has run through multimodal research that includes hundreds of national surveys, focus groups and local ethnographies in English and Spanish, along with ideation sessions.
For over a decade I directed the NBC News exit poll desk, delivering live election-night analysis across NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo and serving on the Exit Poll Pool Survey Committee with competing networks and the AP. I won an Emmy as a producer of the network’s election coverage. At Public Agenda I led research on how the people inside an institution and the people it serves see the same issues differently: principals and superintendents, donors and charity leaders, scientists and the public.
My systems work draws on Elinor Ostrom’s commons governance: who decides what across nested layers of authority, and monitoring the affected community can run itself. I write for audiences that do not share a technical vocabulary.
Services
Work I can take off your plate
I find the structure under a hard question, put it in words every side can use, and run the room where they act on it. Studio Arumí takes on whole studies or one piece of one, from a day’s task to a full engagement, in English or Spanish.
Writing
Book and reports
Book · 2009
How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election
Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, with Ana Maria Arumi and G. Evans Witt. Vintage, 2009. A state-by-state reading of the 2008 election built on NBC News exit poll data. Goodreads
- 2007Compassion, Concern and Conflicted Feelings: New Yorkers on Homelessness and HousingLead author · Public Agenda
- 2006Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, Vol. 3: Anxious Public Sees Growing Dangers, Few SolutionsPublic Agenda with Foreign Affairs
- 2006Reality Check 2006: The Insiders: How Principals and Superintendents See Public Education TodayPublic Agenda
- 2006Reality Check 2006, Issue No. 3: Is Support for Standards and Testing Fading?Public Agenda
- 2006Long Overdue: A Fresh Look at Public and Leadership Attitudes About Libraries in the 21st CenturyContributor · Public Agenda
- 2006Reality Check 2006: Issue No. 2 - How Black and Hispanic Families Rate Their SchoolsPublic Agenda
- 2006Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index, Vol. 2: Americans Wary of Creating Democracies AbroadLead author · Public Agenda with Foreign Affairs
- 2006Reality Check 2006: Are Parents and Students Ready for More Math and Science?Public Agenda
- 2005The Science of Aging Gracefully: Scientists and the Public Talk about Aging ResearchPublic Agenda with the Alliance for Aging Research and AFAR
- 2005The Charitable Impulse: Those who give to charities and those who run them talk about what's needed to keep the public trustLead author · Public Agenda for the Kettering Foundation and Independent Sector
- 2005Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index: Americans Perplexed and Anxious About Relations with Muslim WorldLead author · Public Agenda with Foreign Affairs
The full list is on PolicyArchive.
Current work
Embeddedness distance
Who writes the rule.Who pays for it.
Embeddedness distance is how far the people who write the rules sit from the people who pay for them: the paperwork, the proof, the appeal. When the distance is short, whoever makes the decision feels the consequence and usually fixes it. When it is long, the cost lands on whoever is smallest and closest to the problem.
It builds on Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for governing shared resources, read as a sequence of failure. It is a working brief, open for cases.
Contact
Write to me
Open to research, evaluation and writing roles, and to consulting work.
- LinkedInanamariaarumi
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- PolicyArchiveReports
- GoodreadsAuthor page