Over the past 35 years, CSR has conducted numerous community surveys intended to provide information about the demographics, life experiences, service needs, and civic involvements of residents of the Boston area. Notable community surveys in Boston conducted by CSR include the mid-decade surveys conducted for the Boston Redevelopment Authority in the 1970s and 80s, the 1989 Poverty in Boston Survey for the Boston Foundation's Persistent Poverty Project.

In the past decade, the most extensive of these have been the Greater Boston Social Survey (GBSS) and a series of Boston Area Studies (BAS). The GBSS was part of a four city effort (the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality or MCSUI), funded by the Ford Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation to study racial attitudes, residential segregation, and labor market dynamics. The Boston survey involved 1,820 interviews with randomly selected respondents in an area-probability sample of households in the Boston area, with an oversampling of poor and minority households. The in-person interviews, averaging about 90 minutes, were conducted in English and Spanish. One third of the respondents were African-American, one third Hispanic, and one third white.

The Boston Area Studies were conducted by CSR every year from 1999-2002. These were a series of random digit dial telephone surveys. While many of the questions were repeated annual, each year's survey had a slightly different focus that affected the sample design as well. For example, the goal of the 2000 Survey was to explore the kinds of support children in the Boston area receive and need for the educational and social development. The sample included the entire Boston PMSA, and independent sample of the city of Boston, and oversamples of the four Boston neighborhoods with the highest percentages of children–Dorchester, East Boston, Mattapan, and Roxbury. This survey, developed with input from the Boston Community Building Network at The Boston Foundation to address critical opportunities and challenges facing Boston area households with children, received funding from the Boston Foundation, the Casey Foundation, Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), the City of Boston Department of Human Services, and the City of Boston Department of Neighborhood Development. For information about these studies, contact Mary Ellen Colten.