In Memoriam - Pearl R. Zinner

Friends and colleagues are saddened to learn of the passing of Pearl R. Zinner in June of this past year, at the age of 99.  A New Yorker born and bred, Pearl Zinner joined NORC in 1951, first working out of the New York office as an interviewer at an hourly wage of 50 cents, moving through the survey department ranks, and becoming its director from 1963 until it closed operations in early 1985.
Read more about Pearl Zinner.

AAPOR Convenes Task Force to Formally Examine Polling Performance During 2020 Presidential Election 

The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the nation’s largest organization of survey researchers, is launching a special task force to examine the performance of public opinion polls during the 2020 presidential election. This effort builds on the work of the 2016 task force that showed the national polls performed well.

Not so fast: The Polls and the Iowa Caucuses

The nation’s largest organization of survey researchers, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, urges pundits and journalists not to rush to judgment on the performance of polls in the aftermath of the Iowa Democratic Caucuses.

AAPOR Profile: Leah Christian

​Leah Christian is the Vice President of Data Science at Nielsen, where she has been for the past seven years. Prior to Nielsen, she was a Senior Research at the Pew Research Center. If she isn’t familiar to you in those roles or through her committee memberships at AAPOR, you might recognize her as a co-author on Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method, or the next edition: Internet, Phone, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method. Or maybe you saw the announcement (or award presentation) where Leah was awarded the Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award in 2017 for her part in advancing web-push data collection methodologies.
 

AAPOR Journals Institutional and Corporate Subscriptions
Will your institution or company have access to Public Opinion Quarterly and Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology in 2020? Encourage them to consider purchasing a subscription. Oxford University Press offers subscriptions at institutional and corporate rates for the AAPOR journals each calendar year. Print and online options are available, additional information can be found online.
 

Chapter Spotlight: MAPOR​
MAPOR recently convened its 44th annual conference, our largest ever at 256 attendees! The conference featured a keynote address on "Politics, Privacy and Data for Policy in U.S. Censuses" by Barbara Anderson of the University of Michigan. We also had a pedagogy hour presented by Justine Bulgar-Medina of NORC at the University of Chicago on "The Measurement of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Survey Research," as well as a short course on "Survey Weighting" by Brady West of the University of Michigan.  The conference also featured four different panels, a working group, and papers and posters presented from almost 50 different institutions based on first authorship alone. We were very pleased to introduce Tom W. Smith of NORC at the University of Chicago as our newest MAPOR fellow this year, in addition to new and continued student-focused activities.