SSRS
Presents Cutting-Edge Research at the 2009 AAPOR Conference
June 1, 2009
The annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research featured six papers authored by SSRS researchers. Presentation
topics highlight findings across some of SSRS's key areas of expertise: cell phone sampling, address-based
sampling (ABS), coverage issues,
and research on hard-to-reach populations.
Coverage and response rate issues were foremost on the
minds of many of this year's AAPOR attendees and SSRS's conference
presentations addressed many of these concerns. Susan Sherr and David Dutwin
teamed with Timothy Triplett, Doug Wissoker, and
Sharon Long of The Urban Institute, in Comparing Random Digit Dial (RDD)
and United States Postal Service (USPS) Addressed-Based Sample Designs for a
General Population Survey: The 2008 Massachusetts Health Insurance Survey.
David Dutwin, along with Eran Ben-Porath and Melissa
Herrmann, teamed with Arbitron's Richard Possett and Anna Fleeman to
analyze The When and Where of Cell Phone
Only Incidence.
Another important coverage issue was addressed in A Comparison of Landline Telephone
Households in Zero-Banks to Those in a Traditional RDD Sample: Is Lack of
Coverage a Source of Bias? This paper was authored by David Dutwin,
Melissa Herrmann, and Robyn Rapoport in collaboration with colleagues from our
sister company MSG, Dale Kulp
and Mansour Fahimi.
Melissa Herrmann also teamed with John Benson and Robert Blendon from the Harvard School
of Public Health in studying
the attitudes of a hard-to-reach population in Native
Americans' Health Care Attitudes and Experiences. Other SSRS presentations included Cost
and Quality in Low-Cost Survey Alternatives: A Comparison of Mail Versus Web
by David Dutwin and Karen Donelan of Massachusetts
General Hospital and The
Effects of Judicial Campaign Messages on Voter Mobilization: An Experimental
Study by Jeffery Gottfried of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and SSRS's
Eran Ben-Porath.
First Annual SSRS AAPOR Survey Results:
SSRS thanks everyone who participated in
our booth competition. This year, we asked participants to estimate the
percentage of Americans who trust the mass media, the percentage who trust
public opinion polls, and the percentage who trust their horoscopes. We
included those questions as part of EXCEL, our weekly telephone omnibus survey of
1,000 adults.
Here are the results:
- Mass Media -
45%
- Public
Opinion Polls - 43.2%
- Horoscopes -
11.5%
To learn more about our omnibus services
click here.
We congratulate the winner, Betsy Santos
of Mathematica.
SSRS's Melissa Herrmann to Chair AAPOR's
Education Committee
SSRS President Melissa J. Herrmann is the incoming chair
of AAPOR's education committee. Melissa replaces Mollyann
Brodie of The Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation, who chaired the committee for the past three years. Mollyann will continue as a sub-committee chair for the
ongoing journalist education. Eran Ben-Porath of SSRS will be responsible for
short courses for the 2010 AAPOR conference. Chuck Shuttles of Nielsen will be
sub-committee chair for online education.
