Roper Center’s data curation team have long noticed a very clear pattern. Every year, in the middle of May, the number of polls publicly released drops off for about a week, before returning to normal levels.
This is no mysterious anomaly, just the yearly reprieve from new data announcements by pollsters traveling to the AAPOR annual conference.
See the Roper Center video tribute to AAPOR here.
Since the first meeting of pollsters in Denver in 1946, the yearly AAPOR conference has served as a unique cross of an academic conference, an industry trade show, and a family reunion. Representatives of all parts of the AAPOR community – field directors, professors, software vendors, statisticians, program evaluation specialists, media poll directors, students, market researchers, and so many others – have come together to share research, debate ideas, build community, and see friends.
For Roper Center, the AAPOR annual conference is our yearly opportunity to directly connect with the data providers and users who make up the Roper community. We show off new projects, learn about innovations in the field that will soon be represented in the Roper iPoll collection, and find new data to preserve. In recent years, we’ve announced the Warren J. Mitofsky award winner at AAPOR and debuted new entries in our Polling Pioneers collection.
Like everyone involved with AAPOR, all of us at Roper Center are deeply saddened that the pandemic has prevented an in-person conference, particularly as this is a momentous year: the 75th Annual AAPOR Conference. The AAPOR community is the Roper Center community, the two institutions born together like twins in Williams, Massachusetts in 1947. While the work of each organization is different, their goals are intrinsically connected, unifying around efforts to improve survey research practices, promote transparency and disclosure, and encourage informed use of public opinion data.
Roper Center sends its congratulations to AAPOR on the 75th conference, with particular commendation to the 2020 Conference Committee for quickly adapting the traditional gathering to a virtual meeting. We look forward to once again meeting together in-person in coming years.