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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
​While survey and public opinion research received its fair share of Total Survey Error-based scientific critiques during our recent New Orleans Conference, we’re all painfully aware that our work is also sometimes targeted for unfair criticisms. AAPOR is beginning to take steps to confront some of these issues through the work of two new Ad Hoc Committees that are in the process of being organized.
The Washington-Baltimore Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (DC-AAPOR) has grown to 443 members and is having a busy year.
Spring events included a weighting course (co-sponsored with AAPOR) taught by David Haziza, and a Meet-the-National Council Happy Hour (https://dc-aapor.org/events/past-events/). Seventy people participated in the 2-day weighting course; registrants who were not AAPOR or DC-AAPOR members received membership in both organizations as part of their registration fees. Over 45 DC-AAPOR members came out to Zatyina in downtown DC to meet and mingle with AAPOR board members before their spring business meeting.
The AAPOR’s Transparency Initiative Coordinating Committee is proud to announce three new members to the dedicated committee of AAPOR members who are charged with assessing organizational compliance with disclosure standards. The new members are:
Thanks to everyone for making the 72nd annual conference a huge success! It was a record-setting event on many fronts featuring more attendees (over 1,250) and sessions (110) than ever before. Throughout the conference you could hear attendees lament that there were simply too many good sessions to choose from. As promised, it was the premier event for consuming the latest, cutting-edge research on surveys and substantive findings from public opinion researchers. Meanwhile the unprecedented number and variety of sessions focusing on the 2016 election and polling (17 in total) ensured our conference's standing at the forefront of scholarship and debate on the 2016 vote. Proceedings from the conference will be available soon so be sure to get copies of presentations you might have missed.
The Online Education Subcommittee organizes the AAPOR webinars put on by the Education Committee. This includes planning the annual schedule, tracking webinar performance, and moderating the webinars. We have also undertaken a number of new initiatives such as live streaming events and granting PRC credits for webinar participation (this is a work in progress).