January 2021

Happy New Year AAPOR and best wishes for a better and brighter 2021! The year 2020 will be remembered as a particularly challenging one for many of us, both personally and professionally.

So much has happened in AAPOR Conference-land since our last AAPOR newsletter. The biggest news is that AAPOR Executive Council officially decided to hold the 2021 AAPOR Annual Conference virtually and shifted the dates to weekdays only. Our virtual conference will be held May 11-14, 2021, and the short courses will be held the week before, during the week of May 3, 2021.

I am pleased to report that 1,324 current AAPOR members have already renewed their AAPOR membership for 2021 or joined AAPOR for the first time this year! It is because of members like you that AAPOR continues to be the leading professional organization of public opinion and survey research professionals.  

The APM Research Lab is a one-of-a-kind, public media-based research center. Established in 2017 by American Public Media with the goal of “bringing facts into focus,” the Lab quickly saw the importance of AAPOR’s Transparency Initiative and became a member of the initiative in 2018. The following year the Lab’s Managing Partner, Craig Helmstetter, joined the Transparency Initiative Coordinating Committee.

If you’ve been following along on AAPORnet, Margaret Roller should be a familiar name. Champion of qualitative methods, she and Paul Lavrakas literally wrote the book on Applied Qualitative Research Design before starting the qualitative-focused affinity group within AAPOR, QUALPOR. A long-time member of AAPOR, Margaret’s company, Roller Research, is starting its fifth decade this year, and she also shares her knowledge on her blog, Research Design Review. I interviewed Margaret in December to discuss her career and expertise and why qualitative work is so important in our field. 

We are saddened to share that Jennifer Ann (Shields) Edgar, Ph.D., of Olney, Maryland, died unexpectedly Sunday, November 8, 2020. Jennifer was a longtime member of AAPOR and DC-AAPOR who attended numerous AAPOR annual conferences. Her colleagues remember her wit, kindness and dedication to her work.

AAPOR mourns the loss of Janet Streicher, who died November 16, 2020. She had been the survey director for Baruch College Survey Center since 2015 and was an active member of AAPOR, the New York chapter of AAPOR (NYAAPOR) and World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR).