2020 Award Winners

Due to disruptions in travel caused by the pandemic, the winner of the 2020 AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement will be announced at the 76th Annual AAPOR Conference to be held May 13-16, 2021.

The award is given for outstanding contribution to the field of public opinion research including: advances in theory, empirical research and methods; improvements in ethical standards; and promotion of understanding among the public, media and/or policy makers.

Richard Valliant, Frauke Kreuter and Jill Dever
“Practical Tools for Designing and Weighting Survey Samples”

The AAPOR Book Award seeks to recognize influential books that have stimulated theoretical and scientific research in public opinion; and/or influenced our understanding or application of survey research methodology. Eligibility for the AAPOR Book Award includes any book in the field that is at least three years old (to allow time for books to be read and reviewed), including any books published before or during the period covered by the list of the Fifty Books that Have Significantly Shaped Public Opinion Research 1946-1995.(The books on the "Fifty Books" list have already been recognized by AAPOR and are not eligible for the annual book award.)

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau for the production of the Supplemental Poverty Measure resources, thresholds, and poverty statistics

The AAPOR Policy Impact Award was developed to acknowledge that a key purpose of opinion and other survey research is to facilitate better informed decisions. The award recognizes outstanding research that has had a clear impact on improving policy decisions, practice and discourse, either in the public or private sectors.

Oluwagbenga Agboola, University of Northern Colorado
Seth Behrends, University of Illinois at Chicago
Christoph Beuthner, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Anna Boch, Stanford University
Chandler Case, University of South Carolina
Xiaoyi Deng, University of Maryland
Carlo Duffy, Carnegie Mellon University
Brian Guay, Duke University
Sela Harcey, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jesse Holzman, University of Illinois at Chicago
Sebastian Kocar, Australian National University
Carmen Leon, University of Castilla-La Mancha
Lingxi Li, University of Michigan
Gustavo Lopez, University of California San Diego
Rita Nassar, Indiana University
Lukas Olbrich, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Shin Young Park, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Angelica Phillips, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Albert Rodriguez, Michigan State University
Rachel Stenger, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jerry Timbrook, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Gordon Willis, National Cancer Institute

The AAPOR Public Service Award is intended to recognize and honor outstanding public service and dedication to maintaining AAPOR standards. It recognizes persons who work on behalf of the public sector, and have contributed to the quality of government surveys, data systems, research, leadership, and/ or policy. This award is a means for recognizing the service
and dedication of persons working in or with the public sector and their dedication to protecting, improving, and maintaining survey research standards and data quality.

Alejandra Kaplan, Kristen N. Jozkowski, Indiana University-Bloomington
Yingling Liu, Jerry Z. Park, Baylor University
Nancy Toure, Maria Krysan, University of Illinois at Chicago
Ayana Best, Sara Sadhwani, University of Southern California
Natalie Walls, Timothy Barnett, Jacksonville State University
Fernanda Alvarado-Leiton, Zeina Mneimneh, University of Michigan
Cassandra Berice, Tinaz Pavri, Spelman College
Oceane Tanny, Kelly Foster, East Tennessee State University


The Student-Faculty Diversity Pipeline Award are intended to recruit faculty-student “pairs” interested in becoming AAPOR colleagues. The Award targets members of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups, interested in the study of public opinion and survey research methodology. AAPOR believes that the scholarly and practical understanding of our discipline is enhanced by the presence and involvement of different perspectives and creative thought. Such diversity and inclusion leads to consequential research, improved interdisciplinary collaboration, and a greater ability to address, understand, and solve problems related to public opinion and survey research methodology. This award is for students and faculty who identify as: American Indian or Alaska Native; Asian; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; and Hispanic or Latino. The award is for waived conference registration and annual membership fee for the student and faculty, and one $800 cash awarded to the pair to support travel expenses.

Frauke Kreuter, PhD, University of Maryland, University of Mannheim and Institute for Employment Research (IAB). 

The Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award recognizes accomplishments in the fields of public opinion and survey research that occurred in the past ten years or that had their primary impact on the field during the past decade. The innovations could consist of new theories, ideas, applications, methodologies or technologies. To be considered for the award, innovations must be publicly documented. The award can be given to individuals, groups or institutions.

Arundati Dandapani, Generation1.ca
Jennifer Acosta, Mathematica
Aleksandra Wec, Mathematica
Alexander Wenz, University of Mannheim
Priya Bajaj, Mathematica
Yanqin Lu, Bowling Green State University
Gary Lerner, Abt Associates

The Burns "Bud" Roper Fellow Award is named for the late Burns "Bud" Roper who provided a substantial bequest in his will to endow the Roper Award fund. Roper Fellows are people whose primary work responsibilities are related to survey research or public opinion and who have recently started their careers. They receive financial assistance to help them attend the annual conference and/or participate in conference short courses; most are first-time conference attendees.

Winner: Felicitas Mittereder, University of Michigan
“A dynamic survival modeling approach to the prediction of web survey breakoff”



Honorable Mention: Samantha Sekar, Stanford University
“Understanding misrepresentation: How policymakers perceive signals from constituents on environmental policies”

The Seymour Sudman Student Paper Competition Award is in memory of Seymour Sudman; it recognizes his many important contributions to AAPOR as well as his teaching and mentoring students in the survey research profession.

Angelica Phillips
“Examining the Association between Interviewer and Respondent Speaking Pace in Telephone Interviews”


The Student Poster Competition honors the best student poster presented at the AAPOR annual conference. To be eligible for the award, students must have their poster abstracts accepted for presentation at the conference. The award committee will consider all posters that relate to the study of public opinion, whether they focus on theory, substantive findings, research methods, and/or statistical techniques used in such research.

Mariya Vizireanu
“The Green New Deal: Angeleno Perspectives”

Jerry Timbrook
“The Structure of Scientific Collaboration in the Pages of Public Opinion Quarterly”

Dr. Matthew Desmond, Princeton University

This honor recognizes scholars/researchers, organizations, or institutions who have produced the important data sets, research, and survey methods that have improved the ability to study complex social phenomena related to understudied and underserved, and therefore under-voiced populations. 

Roger Tourangeau, Westat and University of Michigan

The Sirken Award in Interdisciplinary Survey Research Methods Research is given annually to a distinguished survey researcher for contributions to interdisciplinary survey research that improve the theory and methods of collecting, verifying, processing , presenting  or analyzing survey data. 

This winner of the 2020 Harkness Student Paper Award will be announced in July 2020.

This award is given in memory of Dr. Harkness, distinguished cross-cultural survey methodologist, who passed away in 2012.