The constant rain in the capital didn’t dampen the spirits of the tens of thousands of marchers who slogged through the mud to cheer for science this weekend. But it did manage to slow Dana Fisher down a fair bit. On Saturday, April 22, Fisher attended the March for Science in Washington, DC—not to hold clever signs or rail against President Trump, but, well, to conduct science.

Buried by the masses in front of the Washington Monument stage, she wiped the screen of a pink plastic-coated Kindle Fire—a kid’s model—on her pant leg, counted off five people, and squeezed through. “Hi, my name is Dana from the University of Maryland. Would you take a quick survey on my tablet, please?" she asked a man in a poncho and ballcap. “I’m not going to crowd you, but I’ll be here if you have any questions.”

Fisher is a sociologist who studies protest movements. She—like many other scientists, social or otherwise—wants to know who was at the march, why they came, and if they are seasoned protesters or first-time marchers. Her survey aims to compare the people who turned out Saturday both with the protesters at the Women’s March in January and next weekend’s climate march in Washington. Those results will be compared with similar surveys at other protests around the world. The question she wants to answer: Is this the start of a new broad 1960s-style protest movement against the Trump administration, or the effort of smaller, determined group of seasoned protesters?

“I want to understand whether this new cycle of discontent is continuing to draw new people out,” Fisher says. “Is the umbrella expanding or contracting? What motivates people to come out? Is it for science or for people concerned about Black Lives Matter or immigration and this is a chance to protest the president?”

Fisher’s team—a group of 11 graduate students and researchers—was one of several academic groups that treated the event as a human laboratory (or at least a dataset). Some wanted to know if scientists were worried that marching would turn them into partisan actors, as well as whether their colleagues would perceive their participation as too political. Others were tracking the opinions of federal scientists, like those at the EPA who are under fire from the Trump administration.

Jaime Kucinskas found some of her subjects in a coffee shop a few blocks from the rally, where many protesters were finding shelter and warmth. Kucinskas, a sociologist from Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, is hoping to find contacts for a long-term study of the beliefs of federal scientists who are experiencing policy changes (and possibly layoffs). Instead of electronic tablets, she passed out a one-page survey, hoping to get 1,000 participants over the two weekend events in DC.

For her work, it's critical to act fast. “Right now, it seems like people are waiting for Trump to appoint more people in power to see what kind of changes are going to affect these agencies,” she says. With budget cuts proposed for several federal science agencies, older researchers are telling Kucinskas that the current fight over federal science is similar to what happened during the Reagan administration of the 1980s. “But things are changing quickly,” she says. “From a social science perspective, it takes years for research. So how do we get answers to these questions?”

Kucinskas’ methodology is to collect enough contacts at the March for Science and the upcoming climate march so she can conduct more in-depth in-person interviews by phone later. For Michael Xenos, a communications researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his plan was to record field interviews. His team of four graduate students toted digital recorders around the sprawling grounds of the National Mall and Constitution Avenue on Saturday, stopping to interview during the march and rally.

Greg Kahn for WIRED

Xenos himself spent Saturday at his hometown rally and march in Madison, Wisconsin, where a separate team collected 100 interviews to be transcribed later. Xenos and his students want to know how the scientists who marched this weekend came to their decision. Most of their interviewees had thought about the pros and cons of being seen as political, and decided to come out and march for science, rather than against Trump.

“Some people in crowd had been reading about whether it’s a good idea, but obviously everyone there thought it was appropriate to participate,” Xenos says. “Quite a few of them said, ‘I understand there’s a controversy, and there’s a reason to be careful, but here’s why I’m here’”—in general, to support science, scientific research, and the role of science in public policy decision making.

It’s too early to tell whether Midwest scientists are any more or less political than those in the DC area, who often follow the ups and downs of budget proposals and congressional hearings more closely than those outside the Beltway. Xenos hopes his in-depth interviews recorded on Saturday will help answer these questions.

While skies were clear in Madison and in many other cities, Saturday’s drizzling, constant rain nearly short-circuited Fisher’s research efforts. “This is terrible weather for a protest,” she said as the rain picked up. Fisher was hoping the Kindle tablets would speed the processing of survey data and eliminate the drudgery of typing the anonymous questionnaire responses into a laptop. But the rain drenched the electronics, and Fisher stopped the survey after two hours.

Still, she is optimistic. She conducted 212 surveys—out of a planned 500—with a 6 percent refusal rate. That’s slightly lower than the 7.5 percent refusal rate from the Women’s March, and is actually good, because it means she can capture a more representative slice of the march population.

Fisher expects to have enough material for a journal publication later this year. From her anecdotal interactions with marchers at the rally, though, she believes the Washington march was older, whiter, and newer to protests than the women’s event in January. “I think (the March for Science) tapped into a new constituency in terms of people who might be part of the resistance,” Fisher says. “We’re going to dry off the tablets and start looking.”

On Monday afternoon, Fisher said she managed to get preliminary data from 199 of the surveys out of the 212 completed. Her initial assumptions were correct: Nearly 80 percent of the marchers were white, 54 percent were female, and 47 percent had completed a master’s or doctoral degree. As with other marchers, nearly 84 percent of those at the March for Science were Clinton voters, while 98 percent said the outcome of the election was important to their decision to march this past weekend.

Almost a third of all participants (30.2 percent) had never before participated in a protest and 10.6 percent of participants said that they had not been involved in a protest in the past five years. That last bit of data is good news for March organizers and science supporters: There's a new group of protesters out there. The question for them now is how to turn that energy into policy change in Washington.

This story has been updated to include preliminary results of Dana Fisher's research