A Commitment to Transparency
Since the birth of polling, the field has embraced transparency as a core value. Early commercial pollsters openly published details about their methods.,, The Roper Center was established in 1947 as the first social science data archive for data-sharing purposes. The field adopted professional disclosure standards back in the late 1960s, paving the way for the AAPOR Transparency Initiative in 2014., Transparency, then, is not a fad: pollsters have long recognized that it provides the information that is essential for judging a poll’s quality and fit for purpose.
Disclosure standards are not methodological standards; they do not ensure quality, but rather enable quality to be independently judged and verified. Institutional commitment to transparency – like AAPOR’s Transparency Initiative, Roper Center’s Transparency Project, CNN’s transparency requirements for reporting on surveys, and scientific journals’ data-sharing requirements – create a more trustworthy and robust research environment.
Transparency Is Not Enough
Transparency is necessary to allow evaluation of polls, but it is not sufficient: disclosure means nothing if the reader does not understand what the disclosed information means. Journalists, policy makers, students, and the public all read polling results and should have the tools to understand the potential strengths and weaknesses of any survey. Unfortunately, most people lack any training to understand how to interpret information mandated by disclosure standards. Even those with a solid understanding of basic polling principles may be unaware of, or confused by, certain details in a comprehensive survey report. This is entirely understandable: survey methods are changing rapidly, and it is difficult to keep up with the changing methods and their possible effects.
To address this issue, in the summer of 2026, the Roper Center and AAPOR supported a W.E.B. DuBois Scholar to develop a guide to understanding the elements of disclosure. Using the AAPOR Transparency Initiative and Roper Center Transparency Project Scoring as a framework, Du Bois Scholar Nancy Toure (University of Illinois, Chicago) has created a guide to understanding polling disclosure.
Understanding the Guide
The guide is intended to provide a basic overview, in straightforward and comprehensible language, of ways to think about each element of survey disclosure. The guide is not intended to provide value judgments on methodology nor a checklist of settled best practices; in a complex and ever-evolving field with many unresolved debates, this is not possible. A methodology suited to a particular time, place, and purpose might be entirely inappropriate in another context. Instead, for each piece of information that AAPOR and Roper have identified as important for transparency and disclosure, the guide offers:
- A plain language definition
- Why it matters for interpreting results
- What effective disclosure looks like
- What incomplete disclosure looks like
- Strengths when well-disclosed
- Limitations to keep in mind
- Variations that exist
- Related elements
- Resources to learn more
This guide is intended to be a living document, updated over time to reflect changes in the field.
One limitation is worth noting. In standard methodological statements, lack of disclosure may be hard to differentiate from a lack of items to disclose. For example, an organization may have used a subcontractor, an online survey router, or an incentive for participation and not disclosed that information – or, it may simply not have used any of these and therefore did not disclose them. The AAPOR Transparency Initiative and Roper Center Transparency Project provide a structure for reporting that ensures comprehensiveness of information and demonstrates a commitment to full disclosure. In some cases, organizations have adopted the elements of these disclosure standards as an outline for their survey information in releases, providing an excellent model for clarity in reporting.
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By Nancy Toure, Ph.D., 2026 W.E.B. Du Bois Summer Scholar
Additional contributors to this project include Jonathon Schuldt, Roper Center Executive Director; Kathleen Weldon, Roper Center Director of Data Operations and Communications
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