February 2018

Colleagues, sharing with you an update on Executive Council activities. As way of background, our Council meets twelve months a year. Given the geographic dispersion of our elected Council members, seven of these meetings are conference calls, which typically run about two hours in length. The five other meetings are held in person, typically several times in Washington, once in Chicago, and the day immediately preceding our annual conference. As you might imagine, all of our Association’s business and planning activities are reviewed and approved during these meetings, which often makes for intensely packed agendas.

On February 14, the newest slate of candidates for AAPOR’s Executive Council will be announced to the membership. Voting will begin in early March. To arrive at this point takes a lot of input, effort, and good judgement by our members, the Nominations Committee, and AAPOR Council.

Ever wonder how the nominees are selected? Here is how it works.

AAPOR – the journey to take Public Opinion and Survey Research to New Heights continues as we inch closer to the 2018 AAPOR Conference in Denver! As I mentioned last month we had a record number of submissions (770 to be exact) and we have sent out acceptance notices for 636 submissions grouped into 23 Methodological Brief Sessions, 24 Panel Sessions, 51 Paper Sessions and 3 Poster Sessions. We are also going to have 12 PORTAL track sessions where you can take advantage of introductory, accessible talks for new and emerging areas in our field.

Don't miss these exciting short courses at the 73rd Annual Conference in Denver!

Greetings from the Student & Early Career (SEC) Subcommittee of the Membership and Chapter Relations Committee! We’re eagerly preparing and looking forward to another great conference and welcoming all student, early career or new(er) AAPORites this May in Denver!  

GAAPOR is a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered AAPOR members and their friends who get together on Friday night at the annual conference for a social outing. 

PANJAAPOR had a productive fall/winter and we are planning for an eventful spring 2018. 

In November we held our first ever meet and greet at the Dillinger Room in New Brunswick, NJ with the goal of attracting new members. The event was a success, as we had several new faces who were eager to join and connect with current members.

As the federal government prepares to conduct the 2020 Census, critics of the Census Bureau are pushing to make fundamental changes to how it collects its data. This month, Ward Connerly and Mike Gonzalez argued in The Post that the agency should remove questions in the census used to monitor race and ethnicity in our country.
Read the full op-ed

​AAPOR, along with 40 other organizations and numerous individual signers, has signed a statement of support calling on Greek authorities to halt the legal proceedings against Andreas Georgiou, the former president of the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), and other senior ELSTAT officials for their ELSTAT work under Georgiou’s leadership.

On January 30, the American Statistical Association (ASA), in partnership with AAPOR and other organizations in the statistical community, launched a campaign to advance the federal statistical system and awareness of its significant work. Count on Stats is a public outreach initiative, which will enhance understanding of the importance, reliability, and trustworthiness of government statistics.

Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) has released their Federal Statistics, Multiple Data Sources, and Privacy Protection report which is now available for free download on the National Academies Press website.




 

Long-term AAPOR member and DC-AAPOR President, Scott Spillane Fricker was killed on December 22, 2017. He was 48 years old. His life and that of his loving wife, Buckley, were cut short by an act of inexplicable violence. Read more about Scott.

 

Allen Hoisington Barton of Chapel Hill, NC, died on December 18, 2017, at age 93. Allen was Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and served as Director of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) in New York City, NY. He was a tireless advocate for the value of public opinion survey data for understanding important political and social issues. Read more about Allen.