PRESIDENT’S LETTER
Friends don’t let friends miss out.

Our 2004-2005 season is well underway. By the time you read this our program chair Sharon Yates will have presented four sessions. I can’t comment on the workshop I lead but the other three have been fantastic. We did have record attendance for our election wrap up session, but NYAAPOR vets know that is nothing new. More >>

SPRING 2005 EVENTS
By Sharon Yates

NYAAPOR is busy preparing for new events and programs in 2005: More>>

ELECTION COVERAGE

Little Margin for Error
Patrick Moynihan and Laura Backstrom, Fordham University

The polling community may have become accustomed to politicians dismissing the relevance of the polls in decision-making (most notable in recent memory being Governor Schwarzenegger’s statements at the GOP Convention), but this campaign season criticism seemed especially fierce from both the right (e.g., Republican challenges to polling by the Minnesota Star Tribune and the L.A. Times) and the left (e.g., MoveOn.org’s full page advertisement in the New York Times criticizing the Gallup Organization). Coupled with these accusations, suspicion about the veracity of the polls continued throughout the campaign season as results seemed to vary within and between organizations – followed by notable stories in prominent publications as the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle (among others) which critically reviewed vagrancies in polling operations. These are certainly not positive developments for cultivating a credible professional image in the public, but as the coin of the realm in polling is accuracy, it’s reasonable to move beyond the recent spate of claims about the industry and review actual survey organization performances in the national and state pre-election polls. More >>

EVENT COVERAGE

PANEL DISCUSSION ON LOCAL PEOPLE METERS
By Raul Perez, Ph.D.
President, Utilis Research & Consulting
rperez@utilis-research.com

As market research and public opinion professionals, we are interested in issues related to research’s ability to accurately reflect population estimates. Therefore, the polling and market research industry in general has been interested in the developments at Nielsen Media Research (NMR) regarding local people meter (LPM) use in select local markets. As many of our readers know, some of Nielsen’s clients have challenged the LPM’s accuracy when measuring minority populations. Since the spring of 2004, the media has widely covered the controversy on the transition to local people meter data from TV viewing diaries. People meters are devices that automatically record time and channel/station being viewed, but require panel participants (i.e., each household member) to press a pre-assigned button to identify themselves. While people meters have been used for some time to measure audiences at a national level, diary measurement has been the norm in local markets until recently. Separate local market measurement is necessary to inform media buys at a regional level.
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