Newsletters

AAPOR’s Executive Council – What We’re Working on

02/01/2018

Colleagues, sharing with you an update on Executive Council activities. As way of background, our Council meets twelve months a year. Given the geographic dispersion of our elected Council members, seven of these meetings are conference calls, which typically run about two hours in length. The five other meetings are held in person, typically several times in Washington, once in Chicago, and the day immediately preceding our annual conference. As you might imagine, all of our Association’s business and planning activities are reviewed and approved during these meetings, which often makes for intensely packed agendas.

Here’s what happened during our most recent Council meeting, held in-person in Washington on January 11:

• Our Secretary/Treasurer reviewed AAPOR’s financial report for November 2017.
• We reviewed and approved written reports from the Communications, Education, Membership & Chapter Relations, and Conference Planning Committees. We also reviewed an annual report from AAPOR’s representative (Edward Blair) to the Journal of Consumer Research, and a status report from the Ad Hoc Committee concerned with developing an anti-harassment policy, which we hope to have in place before our annual conference in May.
• Appointments were approved to the Monroe Sirken Award Committee (Aaron Maitland), and to the Public Opinion Quarterly Advisory Committee (Jennifer Dykema). In addition, Sunshine Hillygus accepted the position of Chair of that committee.
• The Council discussed plans for instituting a new annual award to be named in memory of Scott Fricker. A formal proposal is being developed that we will finalize and vote on during our February meeting.
• We discussed a recent Washington Post opinion piece regarding the continued inclusion of race/ethnicity questions in the Decennial Census, and reviewed a draft response to that piece.
• A draft report of the Ad Hoc Committee concerned with the development of spam flagging and call blocking and its impact on the field of survey research was submitted by Committee Chair David Dutwin. We expect to follow-up on the committee’s recommendations in the coming weeks and months.
• We approved the formation of a new Task Force on transitions from telephone surveys to mixed mode surveys. Kristen Olson and Jolene Smyth will serve as co-chairs of this effort, which expects to deliver its final report in January 2019. Eight additional members of the Task Force were also appointed.
• The Council also reviewed a proposal from the Diversity Subcommittee of AAPOR’s Education Committee to send AAPOR representatives to attend the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) StatFest 2018, an event that focuses on minority undergraduates, exposing them to graduate studies and careers in statistics, and to sponsor a student luncheon at that event. These activities are consistent with AAPOR’s Diversity Initiative, which was approved by AAPOR’s Council in 2017.
• We discussed AAPOR’s participation in the ASA’s new Count on Stats campaign, designed to address public mistrust of federal government data, and voted to formally sign on as a partner in this effort.
• We also identified topics that need to be covered during our next Council meeting in February. That list is growing by the day, but several we specifically agreed to address include AAPOR development and fund-raising plans for the upcoming year, subscription costs for our journals, and a review of AAPOR website user metrics.
• Finally, we found time to review and approve the Nominations Committee’s recommended list of candidates for our upcoming 2018 Council Elections. For details and insights regarding the how the nominations process works, please see the article by Past President Roger Tourangeau, who chaired this year’s nomination process, in this issue.  

To summarize, the Council continues to work on a multitude of immediate and long range concerns to our membership and our profession. That is, we’re working on quite a bit! Expect to hear more about these various topics in the coming months.