AAPOR 65th Annual Conference Roundup
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, May 22, 2010
Frank Newport, Ph.D., the Editor in Chief of Gallup, provides a nice introduction to the AAPOR conference, American Pollsters Gather in Chicago, discussing the professionalism of most pollsters and the need for the Transparency Initiative, which calls on pollsters to disclose more about the methods behind each poll they make public. David Hill discusses this as well in AAPOR Updates Poll Standards. And “Mystery Pollster” Mark Blumenthal provides A Peek Behind The Curtain: The 35 Organizations Getting Behind AAPOR's New Transparency Initiative Are Striking A Blow For Clarity.
AAPOR awarded its Policy Impact Award to ABC for “Where Things Stand”, which has conducted polls in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2004. Kristen Soltis conducts a video interview with ABC’s Gary Langer and D3’s Matthew Warshaw about the unique challenges of public opinion research in Afghanistan.
Kristen also provides some insights as a first-time attendee to the AAPOR annual conference. Want even more? Check out Kristen and Mark’s 12 posts, most of them video interviews, indexed at AAPOR2010 Interviews Wrap-Up.
For Research magazine, I provided an overview of what market researchers can learn from public researchers. With hundreds of presentations, I recapped just two:
The focus of the AAPOR conference is not on web methodologies, so I left with minor methodological improvements to add to my best practices for Do It Yourself researchers. But that is just because customer research is very distant from public opinion research, which is facing its own challenges.
Reg Baker, aka The Survey Geek, provides a nice summary of the methodological crisis affecting public opinion research:
We have hit a wall. Our mainstay of the last 30 years—telephone research—is not working anymore and we are doing our best to keep propping it up. One implication of that propping up is that costs are continuing to rise even faster because calling cell phones is more expensive than calling landlines. Some are abandoning phone altogether and going back to paper and pencil mail surveys. (If I had predicted that five years ago my blogging credentials would have been revoked!)
He asks, “Where is our Copernicus?” The old geocentric model of the Earth as the center of the universe became harder to explain as more detailed observations of the movements of the stars and planets were made, requiring more elaborate circles within circles to model their movement. Address Based Sampling and Dual Frame Sampling (Landline + Cell Phone) seem to be providing similar circles within circles. Reg was chairman of the AAPOR Online Panel Task Force, which deconstructed why online convenience panels, at least as currently implemented, are not the next scientific paradigm for projectable research.
A dissenting voice on the panel task force, Doug Rivers might argue that sampling matching will provide the new paradigm:
If your working life revolves around surveys, make sure you attend next year’s AAPOR annual conference.