2023 Program and Presentations
2023 Attendees

Invited Addresses:

Stayin’ Alive: Why Survey Research Is Still Working

Scott Keeter
Senior Survey Advisor
Pew Research Center

After a long, slow decline in response rates during the last decades of the 20th century, survey research faced multiple existential threats in the first two decades of the 21st century. Through a combination of human creativity, hard work, and technological innovation, the field evolved and remains strong and viable in 2023. This presentation will examine the evolution of the field during this tumultuous period and assess its current vitality in the face of continuing threats. Among the topics to be discussed are the growth of probability-based household panels, the evolution of modeling and weighting approaches for addressing biases, the explosion of nonprobability methods, and the decline of telephone surveys.

Scott Keeter is a senior survey advisor at Pew Research Center. In this role, he provides methodological guidance to all of Pew Research Center’s research areas. An expert on American public opinion and political behavior, he is co-author of four books and numerous articles. Keeter joined Pew Research Center in 2002 after more than two decades in academia. He is a graduate of Davidson College and received his doctorate in political science from the University of North Carolina. He is a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and a recipient of its highest honor, the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement.

All About Probability-Based Online (and Mostly Online) Panels: Data Quality, Costs, and Operational Logistics

Ipek Bilgen
Principal Research Methodologist
Methodology and Quantitative Social Sciences Department
NORC at the University of Chicago

Due to increasing survey costs and declining response rates, probability-based online (and mostly online) panels have become a viable research vehicle for private, foundational, non-profit, academic, and even for federally sponsored surveys. The attraction of probability-based online panels for surveys is their ability to attain, dependent upon their recruitment methodologies, comparable response rates to cross-sectional surveys at a lower cost and more expeditiously. This presentation will provide a guide for consumers of probability-based online panels to understand what they are working with: What questions to ask and what features to understand about probability-based online panels in evaluating their use for data collection, and how to best use probability-based panel data. Additionally, it will serve as an exploration of best practices for practitioners: Raising issues of total survey error sources, data quality, costs, and operational logistics.

Ipek Bilgen is a Principal Research Methodologist in the Methodology and Quantitative Social Sciences Department at NORC at the University of Chicago. She serves as Deputy Director of NORC’s Center for Panel Survey Sciences and oversees AmeriSpeak’s methodological research. Dr. Bilgen is currently serving as Associate Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ). She also teaches Survey Questionnaire Design course at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.