The past month Sample Solutions struck two birds with one stone when attending both AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research) and WAPOR (World Association for Public Opinion Research) annual conferences, that were held back to back in Toronto. Both events proved to be excellent opportunities for Sample Solutions to present its most recent achievements in Survey Research Telephone Sampling and as well to learn about the work of other survey research professionals and not to mention, to get acquainted with the recent developments within the Public Opinion Research.
From the 16th of May to 22nd May Toronto presented itself as a temporary hotspot for some 800 researchers and survey professionals from all around the world. This year’s main theme of both events focused on Democracies and Public Opinion around the world with keynote speakers discussing the public’s attitude towards their current political state. Besides the keynote speakers many round table discussions among social research experts were held and covered extensive ground on various topics. For the most part, these conjoint conferences were a good opportunity for the vast majority of researchers attending to present their insights, public’s attitudes on certain topics and methodological expertise through the 700 paper submission nested into 120 session categories and hallways filled with poster submissions. The representative of Sample Solutions, Carsten, Nikola and Katerina had difficulties choosing between the many sessions in such limited time.
Among these 700 papers, during WAPOR days, Sample Solutions presented its recent Methodology paper “Data Collection Mode Change: Going from CAPI to CATI – The case of Greece” where we ruled out pros and cons insights of both survey modes in a country that has a considerable island population and a relatively high telephone penetration rate.
Also a worthy mention is the co-authored paper presentation together with Gallup on the AAPOR session of Techniques for Improving Response Rates with the presentation “Who are we missing? Does pulsing/HLR lookup of telephone samples work?” for which they described how using these screening techniques, employed by Sample Solutions, increases fieldwork productivity when surveying Europe and Asia.
Despite the busy mornings and afternoons of attending different sessions the breaks between the sessions left room to recharge our energy with a freshly brewed coffee with old friends of the company, indulged by fruitful follow-up discussions of the sessions attended.
These two events were the first of their kind for Nikola and Katerina, it left them returning back home with nothing but good impressions of all the moments that occurred during these two conferences and high expectations for the next conferences to come. So we have already started brainstorming topics of the next year’s AAPOR and WAPOR conferences.
But that won’t stop us from attending more of these for rest of 2019, since we are preparing for the European Survey Research Association 8th Conference in Zagreb, Croatia, from 15th to 19th July.
See you on this year’s ESRA conference, where we’ll be presenting our upcoming papers on B2B and Consumer sampling in Europe.
Looking forward to next year’s AAPOR in Atlanta and WAPOR in Salamanca, Spain!
Carsten Broich
Carsten is the founder of Sample Solutions and Lifepanel with over a decade of sampling and social research experience. A trained aerospace engineer who discovered his love for random phone numbers.
