Turning Point of Survey Design

From the 2019 Annual Conference of AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research)

Abstract

This is a report on the 2019 Annual Conference of AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research) held in Toronto, Canada for four days from May 16th to 19th, 2019, which the author attended. The AAPOR Conference is a grand-scale academic meeting where over a thousand researchers and academics gather together not only from the United States but from all over the world. The 2019 Conference set no themes but organized a number of sessions related to survey designs, which did represented the turning point of the survey design. The author took part in a short course instructed by Don A. Dillman— internationally renowned authority, who developed web-push survey that send a request for responding to a survey by post and collect the responses on the Internet. Dr. Dillman explained the purpose of the survey method and let the participants experience practical examples. Dillman’s web-push survey method is expanding worldwide, and it was mentioned even in the key note speech at the opening of the Conference as a successful example that Canadian census in 2016 had introduced the web-push survey method and increased the Internet response rate to nearly 70%. This paper also reports a practical example of a study combining data measured by various sensors on smartphone and survey data, a session on transparent reporting of integrated data quality, and a case with combination of apps, wearable devices, and survey results to collect data on elderly persons’ daily lives. Throughout the Conference, we strongly felt that concrete solutions were yet to be found; research data, big data, and data integration were all faced with certain challenges.