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.
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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.
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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!
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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!)
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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:
- Figuring out how to improve on the highly successful annual conference in Austin;
- Keeping the Transparency Initiative moving forward;
- Continuing to cope with the fallout from the FCC’s TCPA ruling;
- Providing quick responses to journalists on the performance of the polls during this Presidential year;
- Encouraging diversity in all our activities, task forces, and committees;
- Partnering with kindred organizations;
- Increasing our fund-raising efforts to bolster AAPOR’s finances; and
- Improving our service to members.
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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.
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AAPOR is presenting three webinars in the coming months! Click the link to learn more and to register. The June webinar is “Cell Phones: Current Practice and the Future of Telephone Interviewing.” The July webinar is “A Truthful Art: Effective Communication with Charts, Maps and Infographics.” The September webinar is “Extending the Total Survey Error Perspective to Multiple-Surveys and Big Data.” Be on the lookout for the October webinar on nonprobability samples, the November professional development webinar on publishing and the December webinar on smartphone surveys!
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If I dare say so myself, the 2016 AAPOR Conference was one of the best. Our conference in Austin was the largest ever in terms of number of presentations submitted, and in the number of attendees. We expanded the conference to allow for no less than 100 breakout sessions. We continued a great tradition of new attendees (275) through a call for attendance to data science programs, local Texas schools and organizations, and other outreach efforts, and made a particular effort to be welcoming to newcomers via an expanded docent program, meet and greets, and other new social events. Our efforts to improve moderator and presenter quality I believe resulted in the strongest collection of presentations ever compiled at an AAPOR conference, which were nicely organized by tracks for the first time.
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Our Coordinating Committee continues to build and develop AAPOR’s Transparency Initiative. We recently completed a TI member survey to learn more about what participating organizations think about their involvement. We were pleased with members’ overall positive reactions to the Transparency Initiative. This month, we’re sharing some of the many favorable comments that were volunteered by some of those respondents. The full survey results will be released at the AAPOR conference in May.
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Is AAPOR 2016 in Austin, TX your first time at the conference? Are you not sure what to expect? Or do you just want more information on AAPOR2016 and Austin itself? The Student and Early Career Engagement Subcommittee has just what you need: The Guide for New Attendees!
Use the guide to find student and early career professional-specific activities at the conference and decide what the best ways for you to network at the conference are. The guide can help you decide that! Need help making the most of your trip to Austin? The guide has information just for you!
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