In conjunction with Poynter.News University, AAPOR has updated the "Understanding and Interpreting Polls" free online course for journalists ahead of the 2016 general election. As the election approaches, journalists are bombarded with data from polls and this course informs media on how to separate the wheat from the chaff to improve reporting about polls and survey results.
The Southern Chapter of AAPOR (SAPOR) spans from Virginia down to Texas. While most of our members are located in Raleigh, NC, where the chapter began almost 40 years ago, the SAPOR board has been actively recruiting members from the rest of the states in our region while also working on adding member benefits and networking opportunities. SAPOR’s membership roster includes many states outside of our region as well
THANK YOU to the nearly 700 of you who participated in the 2016 AAPOR Survey!
The feedback you provided in the annual survey is invaluable and will help us better understand how we can improve AAPOR and our future national conferences. We know you are busy and appreciate your time and feedback. We’ll start sharing results from the survey in next month’s newsletter.
This month we are featuring the Southern Chapter of AAPOR (SAPOR) in our “Chapter Spotlight.” Are you a member of your local chapter? If not, learn more about the chapters here!
In her 2016 Presidential Address, Mollyann Brodie challenged AAPOR to move beyond best intentions to take actions that make our organization the “Big Tent” we want it to be: a place that embraces both the evolving nature of the profession as well as the diversity of perspectives and personal characteristics of our existing and potential members, and multicultural country at large. Doing so, she argued, is not just the right thing to do but vital to our continuing relevance and growth.
Are the polls getting worse?
In the U.K., the polls were, in the aggregate, pretty far off in predicting the outcome of the 2015 Parliamentary election. A blue ribbon panel led by Patrick Sturgis concluded that “The opinion polls in the weeks and months leading up to the 2015 General Election substantially underestimated the lead of the Conservatives… In historical terms, the 2015 polls were some of the most inaccurate since election polling first began in the UK in 1945.” The report by Sturgis and his colleagues also notes that the polls in the U.K. have often been off in their predictions of the vote shares for the various parties but those errors didn’t get so much publicity in the past because the polls correctly picked the winning party.
The Baltimore-Washington Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (DC-AAPOR) has experienced a fruitful spring and is looking forward to an eventful summer.
Membership Chair Ashley Amaya has grown DC-AAPOR to 423 members since this time last year. In April, some of these members participated in two events, the “Introduction to R Short Course” taught by Jill Dever and the “Spanish Survey Translation and Administration Workshop,” in which DC-area Spanish translation experts presented and discussed their work.
Thank you to those that participated in all of the events for Student and Early Career (SEC) members at the 71st Annual Conference in Austin - you helped make it a great conference experience for new and veteran SEC folks! In addition to amazing presentations, speed-networking and other professional development opportunities, we also took time out to explore Austin together. We enjoyed live music together on 6th Avenue patios and Rainey Street, a lunch take-over (with 39 of us!) at Easy Tiger and two other dinner meet-ups on Wednesday and Friday nights around town. Thank you to those that joined us and made for some great outings, we hope you’ll join us again next year!
It was great to see so many AAPOR members--new and old--at the 2016 AAPOR conference! This month’s Membership and Chapter Relations (MCR) Committee update features a plug to complete the annual survey, an update from our Student and Early Career Subcommittee Chair, and the first in our 2016-2017 series of “Chapter Spotlights.” (Are you a member of your local chapter? If not, learn more about the chapters here!)
Welcome from the members of the 2016-2017 Executive Council! We will have a busy year ahead of us. Some of the high priority items that Council will be dealing with include:
Do you know which of our AAPOR luminaries: Conducted surveys as a Vietnam veteran? Wanted to study about Burma and wound up a leader in media polling? Had to explain why the polls were “wrong” in a New Hampshire primary? Played a key role in the infamous 2000 Presidential election exit polls? The answers to these questions and many, many other fascinating insights about their experiences and contributions can now be found in the new additions to our Heritage Interview series.