August 2017

Hoping you have had an opportunity to take some time off to enjoy the beautiful summer we are enjoying (in most places) this year. Here at AAPOR, we’ve also managed some down time but have in addition had a particularly busy several months. Back in June, I outlined the activities of two new ad hoc committees charged with confronting the old problem of sugging & frugging, and the relatively new problem of false accusations of manipulation being made against surveys and public opinion polls. In addition to these efforts, there are two other AAPOR ad hoc committees that have just begun addressing other issues of importance to our community that you should be aware of.

This is an exciting time in the realm of AAPOR's educational programs, as we are welcoming several new volunteers and subcommittee chairs. Work is already underway on programming for 2018, and this promises to be an exciting year of continued growth in terms of educational offerings.

During the 2017 Annual AAPOR conference, we brought back the keynote address by having a great kickoff conversation entitled “Assessing the Climate for Surveys and Social Science Data Collection.”  The participants of the panel included industry experts Claudia Deane, John Dick, Peter Miller and Marie Omero along with Michael Link as moderator.  One thing that became very clear from this panel is that Survey and Public Opinion Research is very much alive but the ways in which we accomplish our work may be changing or shifting.  The experts discussed great opportunities that are being explored at the interface of our field and other fields such as technology and data science, for example.

In October, AAPOR will be celebrating three years of the Transparency Initiative. The TICC (Transparency Initiative Coordinating Committee) has been hard at work throughout the year conducting the biennial reviews of all members who joined in 2014 and 2015.  As of July, almost half of all TI members have passed their review or are presently under review.

The cross-cultural and multilingual research affinity group was initiated by AAPOR members in 2016 and has the following mission and vision:

• Mission: Connect AAPOR researchers and leaders to facilitate a regular dialogue about improved methods, measurement, and research & publication opportunities.
• Vision:  Cultivate an environment where cross-cultural and multilingual research is visible and important to all survey and public opinion researchers. 

In 2017, the affinity group collaborators organized five panels at the annual conference in New Orleans and contributed to the June issue of Survey Practice dedicated to cross-cultural and multilingual research. See more information about the group here.

Greetings AAPOR members! I am thrilled to share more about our 36th annual SAPOR conference. We have a lot in store for this year’s conference attendees. The conference will be held in downtown Raleigh, NC, October 5-6, 2017. We invite researchers to submit papers ASAP as our extended deadline of August 18th is quickly approaching.

Having established her reputation as a public opinion expert over the course of the past 20+ years, Molly Brodie plays two big roles at the Kaiser Family Foundation. As Executive Director of Public Opinion and Survey Research, her work focuses on understanding public knowledge of health care policy issues and the role of opinion and personal experiences in policy debates. Immediately after finishing her PhD in Health Policy in 1995, Molly joined the Foundation as its first public opinion specialist and grew the department that now designs, conducts and disseminates dozens of major policy-oriented surveys annually. In addition to overseeing all of the KFF’s polling, in her role as Senior Vice President for Executive Operations Molly is responsible for all executive operations of the Foundation and serves as liaison to its Board of Trustees.

Congratulations to the winners of RH 3.0! Hackers worked in teams and spent the better part of the first day of the conference in New Orleans working on an app to facilitate using the U.S. Census Bureau’s Planning Database (PDB). The PDB provides selected 2010 Census and American Community Survey demographic and socioeconomic estimates at various levels of geography and includes area-level Low Response Score (LRS) estimates.