CAUTION: This is a demo version of the first issue. Survey Practice has not launched.
Survey Practice began as an idea of Bob Groves, Sandy Berry, and a few others who thought that AAPOR needed a publication that could provide good, sound information to new survey researchers, be relatively flexible, be able to address current issues, and be easy to read. The AAPOR executive council agreed and approved the concept.
Survey and public opinion research is both messy and robust. We often find messy situations such as the New Hampshire primary polling. We also find that survey methods are so robust that decreasing response rates have not necessarily produced less useful data.
Tom W. Smith
NORC
University of Chicago
Following the First Law of Studying Societal Change, the General Social Survey (GSS) strives for consistent measurement over time by employing constant measures. However, in certain cases measures have been changed for various reasons. When such alterations have been introduced, the GSS has introduced the revised version in a controlled manner, typically using some combination of across-subjects experiments and within-subjects repetition. This procedure is important so that variation due to measurement effects is not confounded with studying true change. This report considers a possible change in the GSS measure of self-rated health (HEALTH).
Scott Keeter, Gregory Smith, Courtney Kennedy - Pew Research Center
Chintan Turakia, Mark Schulman - SRBI, Inc.
J. Michael Brick - Westat
In 2007, the Pew Research Center conducted what is believed to be the first-ever national telephone survey of a probability sample of Muslim Americans, a rare, dispersed, and highly diverse population. The study examined the political and social values, religious beliefs and practices, and life experiences of Muslims living in the U.S. today. This paper describes the challenges faced in designing a questionnaire with a great deal of sensitive content, and in administering the survey to a population apt to be wary of being interviewed about these topics.
George F. Bishop and Stephen T. Mockabee
Department of Political Science
University of Cincinnati
Assessing the “mood of the country” has become a staple in the diet of American public opinion polling (Hugick and DiAngelo, 2006; Ladd, 1992). The major polling organizations routinely ask questions about whether Americans are “satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time” or whether “things in this country are heading in the right direction or…off on the wrong track.”
Kenneth Prewitt is a Professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University. He has formerly held positions as director of the U.S. Census Bureau, director of the National Opinion Research Center, president of the Social Science Research Council, and senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. We asked him about his career and the major issues the survey field is facing. In particular, Dr. Prewitt has raised concerns about privacy and confidentiality, and declining cooperation in surveys, at a time with increasing amounts of information from multiple sources.
Fieldnotes - a not so random sample of ideas and activities in survey research.
The AAPOR Executive Council recently approved a report from the Cell Phone Task Force. The report, along with the special POQ issue on cell phones, provides a comprehensive look at the impact of cell phones on telephone surveys. They also identify the research that is needed to bring cell phone interviewing into the everyday part of telephone surveys. The report is long but has important information in it. Well worth the time to read it.
