Thank you to our guest blogger, Laura Young, for her reflections during the conference!
Wednesday
The tone for my first day back at this year’s AAPOR was set by the charismatic Danny Goldstein, moderator of the session on Question Order and Placement and Formatting. Needless to say, after an energizing fun run (or breathless jog, in my case), I was already pumped for my first 9am session within the first minute.
Adam Kaderabek was up first, presenting the promises and pitfalls of complex grid structures in mail surveys with regards to skip patterns. He was followed by PhD candidate Çağla Yildiz, who dazzled with a natural experiment on plausible and implausible straightlining using GESIS panel data. Then, utilizing data from sixteen countries, Rona Hu impressed with a novel seemingly unrelated regression analysis on the effects of using “Select All That Apply” versus Yes/No question formats. The presentations ended strongly with Allyson Holbrook’s research on how response format and mode are associated with response order effects, which also made use of an experiment in Gallup survey. Down to the last second of the session, the audience engaged our speakers in the Q&A: How do we properly compare surveys with different formats? What do we consolidate the tradeoff between a reducing respondent’s cognitive burden and the many, many other requirements that a survey must fulfill?
Right out of the gate, the AAPORites were thirsty for knowledge.
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Thursday
The second day of the AAPOR 80th Annual Conference started bright and early with a session far too exciting for an 8:30 am time slot. Expertly organized and moderated by Rajesh Srinivasan from Gallup, five fascinating presentations treated all those who were able to get themselves out of bed and into Regency C to a look at trust, drugs, and conspiracies. An excellent and natural continuation of the topics discussed in yesterday’s joint plenary session, this panel bore the name Decreasing Trust and Increasing Partisanship: Attitudes towards Media, Brands, and Drugs.
Backed by an impressively international team racking their brains over the American public’s perceptions of online fact-checking and the conditions under which conspiracies arise, Timothy Gravelle from Vox Pop Labs started the session out with a bang. It was truly a tough act to follow, but University of Nebraska’s Patrick Habecker did not at all disappoint with compelling research on opposition in the Great Plains State toward overdose prevention sites and drug decriminalization. From Megan Brenan, we were treated to a smorgasbord of results from Gallup on American partisan confidence in traditional media.
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Friday
Sometimes, it’s surprisingly easy to find the perfect words to describe a great experience. Other days, when you’re confronted with so many inspiring ideas and engaging conversions with talented people, you need a little time to let it all sink in before you can fully appreciate it and really put pen to paper. And then there’s the secret third option, where being unable to say No to a good BBQ dinner turns into being unable to say No to a beer and a country cover band… and then you have to start your writing a little later than planned.
My last day at AAPOR started early again. Though I didn’t attend the first session this time around (sorry y’all), the time was spent with so many new and familiar faces, simply mingling in the exhibitors hall. And then, when the time came for the next session, I was fully caffeinated and ready for Everyone Counts: Innovations For Leaving No Populations Behind, moderated by University of Michigan’s Brady West. First, Larry Danforth of Jefferson Community College took us back to a time of good ol’ pen and paper, demonstrating some eye-opening best practice take-aways when sampling and interviewing various hard to reach populations: sometimes you need to think about incentivizing your interviewers rather than your respondents. Nielsen’s Ryan Baer addressed the ever salient issue of dwindling response rates and made a compelling case for targeted reselects, using evidence from his research into audience media consumption. Vince Welch from NORC addresses the response rate issues in his vital research on veteran suicide prevention with a quasi experiment with variable monetary incentives, asking the question: what is the bigger motivator – the amount of incentive or the change itself? Beyond that, his work underscored the importance of qualitative work ahead of survey research to fully understand the salient issues of a population. Then, with the very clever use of a reoccurring graph in her presentation, Sunghee Lee from the University of Michigan thoroughly convinced me of the merits of adaptive response driven sampling for reaching elusive or stigmatized populations.
The last presentation was a joint effort by Carsten Baumann from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and Thomas Brassell from ICF, which not only examined the impact of survey awareness initiatives on response rates from their ongoing research, but doubled as a convincing advertisement for the beautiful mountain state, with many slides decorated with scenic views in Colorado.
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