WAPOR 77th and WAPOR Asia Pacific 7th Joint Annual Conference

28-31 July 2024 ● Seoul, South Korea

2024 WAPOR CONFERENCE PROGRAM August 01 2024

WAPOR 77th Annual Conference took place on July 28-31, 2024 in Seoul, South Korea. The 2024 WAPOR conference was conducted in conjunction with the 7th Annual Conference of the WAPOR Asia Pacific Regional Chapter. The 2024 WAPOR annual meeting was hosted by Survey Research Center at Sungkyunkwan University (25-2 Seonggyungwan-ro, Jongno District, Seoul, South Korea) and co-organized together with the National Research Council for Economics, Humanities, and Social Sciences; Korean Sociological Association; Korean Association of Party Studies; the Korean Association for Survey Research; KOSSDA-Korea Social Science Data Archive; the Institute of Social Development and Policy Research at Seoul National University; and PMI.  The 2024 conference was conducted in person. The event was led by the WAPOR Conference Chair Prof. Wolfgang Aschauer (Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria), WAPOR Local Conference Chair Prof. Jibum Kim (Sungkyunkwan University, Korea), and WAPOR Asia Pacific 2024 Conference Chair Prof. Seokho Kim (Seoul National University, Korea). 

Conference Theme

The Soul of Public Opinion Research: Liberty, Quality and Humanity

WAPOR has met twice after the subside of the global pandemic. In Dubai we reviewed the world’s 75 years of public opinion research development after the last world war, and in Salzburg we discussed the challenges of technology on opinion research. It is time that we look back at the basic values of our profession and discuss how we can overcome all present-day challenges facing humankind without losing sight of our fundamental beliefs.

As a continuation of our Salzburg discussion, in Seoul we continued to explore the challenges posed by internet technologies, social media platforms, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and a lot more. We continued to ask questions like: What threats do non-probability samples and AI pose to public opinion research and election forecasting?  What are the challenges and opportunities in big data analytics? What are the latest developments in public opinion research, misinformation, and the study of campaigning and voting behavior? But in 2024 we drew our attention to analyzing the role and application of survey research in monitoring public opinion across the world, and how continuous and ongoing innovations in the conduct, analysis and interpretation of public opinion research has helped to make people’s voices heard across the globe. As we head towards the mid-2020s, the world is again facing wars and many unprecedented global challenges, and we need to ask ourselves again and again how public opinion research can mitigate these global problems and crises. So we specifically addressed questions around the topics what we have learned from public opinion and elite opinion over time and what does the latest public opinion research tell us about the pressing societal issues. We need to study ways to promote positive values, and resolve national, social, ethnic, and even cultural conflicts. We obviously need to protect the right of people’s voices to be heard, thereby bringing liberty and equality to the equation of humanity. We need to go back to these core values. Seoul was a stop for this soul-searching journey.

As a continuation of our WAPOR tradition, the 2024 conference theme was broad. We continued our discussion of technology advancement, bringing in new topics related to humanistic development, and we will not drop our longstanding ‘classical’ public opinion research topics of importance such as electoral studies, freedom to publish polls, the quality of public opinion research around the world, traditional media research, methodological challenges in public opinion research and so on.  

The upcoming conference presentations, posters, and panels included, but was not limited to, the following topics:

  • Protecting the core values of public opinion research
  • Freedom to conduct and publish opinion research
  • Public opinion and conflict resolution
  • Public opinion and public diplomacy
  • Public opinion, policymaking, and survey research
  • Public opinion, elections, and voting
  • Political behavior, participation, and culture in survey research
  • Methodological challenges and improvements in the areas of sampling, measurement, survey design and survey response or non-response
  • Best practices for stakeholder research and expert surveys
  • Panel studies, longitudinal surveys and established survey programs nationally  monitoring public opinion
  • Qualitative research
  • Survey research applications
  • Comparative research and international survey projects
  • Cross-cultural concerns in data collection and measurement issues
  • Data archiving for the advancement of humanity
  • News, media, journalism, and public opinion
  • New sources of information on public opinion and the use of social media
  • Public opinion and misinformation
  • Advertising online, media and audience research
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges in public opinion research and survey methods
  • Big data, sentiment analysis and machine learning
  • Public opinion and virtual reality
  • Digitalization and new sources of information in survey research
  • E-voting, e-deliberation, e-panels
  • The potentials and limits of online-surveys
  • New tools for data visualization
  • Alternative methods to express public opinion​​

Paper Awards

Naomi C. Turner Award

The Naomi C. Turner Prize is presented at the WAPOR annual conference for the best graduate student paper. This prize was endowed by WAPOR past president Fred Turner in memory of his mother. Fred was president of WAPOR in 1989-1990. A special thank you to the Turner Prize committee, including Mark Gill, Christopher Adams, Cornelia Mothes, Thomas Roessing, and Matthew Barnidge. The committee is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 Naomi Turner prize is Yin Wu (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) for the paper “The Words We Choose to Believe: Comparing the Influence of Press, Valence, Nationalism, and Emotion on Trust in Foreign Media Coverage of the U.S. on Facebook”. The paper tackles an important topic and, with refinement, could contribute valuable insights to the field. It deals with a range of significant concepts and has the potential to advance our understanding of trust, ideology, and cultural alignment. The committee recommends some issues to be considered by the author to enhance the paper’s clarity and effectiveness. The title could be changed so as not suggest that Facebook is a factor. The sampling methodology could be better explained (with more information on the sampling limitations) and the inclusion of basic descriptive statistics would provide greater clarity. Simplifying the paper by focusing on core concepts, streamlining analyses, and clarifying theoretical contributions, along with a more detailed explanation of the hypotheses’ theoretical motivations, would significantly improve the study. Nevertheless, the ambition of the study is commendable, and the breadth of its conceptual framework demonstrates a thorough engagement with complex social phenomena.

Janet A. Harkness Award

The Janet A. Harkness Award is a joint award of the WAPOR and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). This award is given in memory of Dr. Janet A. Harkness, internationally recognized for her contributions to cross-cultural survey methodology. The award is given for the best paper on multi-national, multi-regional or multi-cultural survey research (aka 3M survey research) produced by a student. Thank you to the members of the Janet Harkness Student Paper Award Committee. These include ChanHoong Leong, Mariano Torcal, Angela Ambitho, Sunghee Lee, Heather Smalley, and Evgenia Kapousouz. The committee is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 Janet A. Harkness Award are Mao Li (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), Stephanie Morales (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA), and Kaidar Nurumov (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA) for their paper “Probing on Self-Rated Health and Autocoding Its Responses through Large Language Models (LLM): Strengths and Weaknesses under Multilingual Survey Contexts“. The study evaluates the innovative use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the coding of open-ended survey responses, which is traditionally labor-intensive and costly. LLMs’ performance in coding responses from English, Spanish, German, and Korean speakers across five countries are examined, using data from 3 separate studies, with a combined sample size of over 5,500 participants. Results show that LLMs outperform traditional machine learning algorithms. Performance is consistent across English, German, and Spanish, but slightly lower for Korean, highlighting an opportunity to improve LLMs for underrepresented languages. The committee is impressed by the students’ work, and the study underscores the potential of LLMs to streamline survey research and calls for further exploration in diverse linguistic contexts.

Elizabeth H. Nelson Award

The Elizabeth H. Nelson Prize is awarded for best conference paper from a society in transition. This prize was endowed by WAPOR past president Elizabeth Nelson who was president of WAPOR from 1991-1992. Thank you to our review committee members for the Nelson Prize – Constanza Cilley, Michael Nitsche, Rico Neumann, Saidul Haq and Eva Aizpurua. After considerable debate, the committee decided not to make an award this year. That was a difficult decision and we recognize and appreciate the time and effort invested by members of this award committee.

Alexis de Tocqueville Award

De Tocqueville saw democracy as an equation that balanced liberty and equality, concern for the individual and as well as for the community. Given the ongoing relevance of his observations, this award is given annually to a paper presented at the WAPOR conference that is concerned with democracy and public opinion in the world, whether in consolidated or in emerging democracies. A special thank you goes to the 2024 Award Committee, including WAPOR Presidents Timothy Johnson, Marita Carballo, Claire Durand, Kathy Frankovic, Alejandro Moreno, the current President Robert Chung and Vice-President David Jodice. This year’s the Alexis de Tocqueville Award goes to Alexis Jan Patacsil (Bangko Sentral Pilipinas, Philippines) and Reginald Ugaddan (University of the Philippines, Philippines) for their paper “Power in Numbers: Defining Democracy in the Philippines through Social Capital, Citizen Empowerment and Political Support, and Trust in Political Institutions“. This paper merits recognition for its insightful analysis of the interplay between social capital and democratic perception in the Philippines during Duterte’s administration. By leveraging Putnam’s Social Capital Theory, the authors delve into how citizen empowerment and trust in political institutions mediate this relationship, with governance quality acting as a crucial moderating factor. Utilizing robust statistical methods on data from the Asia Barometer Survey, the study reveals that social capital’s impact on democratic understanding is not direct but fully mediated by political support and trust. This research stands out for its rigorous methodology, theoretical innovation, and significant contributions to understanding democracy in Southeast Asia’s unique sociopolitical landscape. 

Robert M. Worcester Award

Every year, the Robert M. Worcester Prize is given in recognition of the best article published in IJPOR – the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, the journal of WAPOR. Evaluation of all papers published in the previous calendar year takes place in two steps, first by the members of the international editorial board of the journal, and then by an award committee appointed by the WAPOR council. A winning article is selected as a result of these two rounds of evaluation. Thank you to the members of the editorial board who participated in the evaluation as well as the members of the WAPOR award committee including Tom Smith, Paulina Tabery, Jibum Kim, Anna Andreenkova, Constanza Cilley and Robert Worcester as ex officio member. The recipients of the 2023 Worcester Award are Seungsu Lee (University of California, USA) and Jaeho Cho (University of California, USA) for their paper “Communication Mediation in an Era of Partisan Selectivity: Modelling Effects of Information and Discussion on Participation“. The award committee comments that, Lee and Cho use the communication mediation model (CMM) to examine patterns of partisan communication in contemporary polarized politics and fragmented partisan media environments. They test the CMM considering (a) two types of news consumption (like-minded and cross-cutting) in the place of overall news use and (b) both affective and cognitive responses. They find a partisan CMM that consists of a two-step mediation linking partisan news consumption to participation through talk and affective polarization. They utilized national survey data covering three U.S. presidential election cycles (the 2012, 2016, and 2020 American National Election Studies). Their study developed a theoretical framework for exploring polarization, political discussions and participation. It is analytically rigorous, uses high-quality survey data, and creates a framework for examining this important issue in the future.

2024 Best Conference Poster Awards

The Best Conference Poster Award is a new, ad-hoc award introduced for this year’s annual conference. This award recognizes the most outstanding poster presentation at the conference, highlighting exceptional clarity, originality, and impact in the research showcased. This award honours the poster that effectively communicates its findings and contributes significantly to the advancement of knowledge in the field, demonstrating both scholarly rigor and creative presentation. Thank you to the members of the Best Poster Award Committee: Timothy Johnson, Wolfgang Aschauer, Chase Harrison and Olga Kamenchuk. This year two poster awards are given by the Committee: the Best Poster Award and the Best Student Poster Award.

The committee is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 Best Poster Award is Yul Min Park (University of Pittsburgh, USA) for the poster “Issue Ownership, Electoral Accountability, and Politicians’ Social Media Posts: Evidence from the George Floyd Protests in the United States”. This poster features an insightful exploration of the interplay between technology and political communication, revealing critical drivers behind politicians’ social media behavior. Through a rigorous case study of the 2020 George Floyd protests, the research elucidates how race, party affiliation, and constituency demographics influence the frequency and framing of political issues on Twitter. The study’s innovative use of computational methods and multi-level analysis provides robust evidence of the partisan disparities in addressing systemic racism and protest violence. These findings significantly advance our understanding of political communication dynamics in modern democracies, highlighting the nuanced role of social media in shaping public discourse.

The committee is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 Best Student Poster Award is Sujin Song (Chung-ang University, Republic of Korea) for the poster “Does Political Participation Buffer Depression of the Discriminated? Application of Anomic Depression Theory”. This poster features a profound investigation into the impact of discrimination on mental health, utilizing Anomic Depression Theory to elucidate this relationship. By analyzing data from the 2022 Korea Social Integration Survey, the study highlights how discrimination experiences significantly correlate with higher depression rates, particularly among women, high school graduates, and religious individuals with lower income and health status. The innovative application of hierarchical multiple regression reveals that political participation can effectively buffer the adverse effects of discrimination, offering a crucial intervention for mitigating anomic depression. These findings provide vital insights for practitioners and policymakers, emphasizing the importance of fostering political engagement to enhance mental health in marginalized populations.

Helen H. Dinerman Award

This award, given since 1981, honors particularly significant contributions to survey research methodology. The award, presented annually to an individual or individuals, is in memory of Helen Dinerman’s scientific achievements over three decades of public opinion research. Recent recipients of the award include Takashi Inoguchi, Mitchell Seligson, Juan Díez Nicolás, Michael Traugott, and Christian Haerpfer. A special thank you to this year’s review committee, including Timothy Johnson, Patricia Moy, Edith de Leeuw, Michael Traugott, and Christian Haerpfer.

WAPOR is pleased to present the 2024 Helen Dinerman Award to Dr. Ineke Stoop for her lifetime of contributions to the furtherance of survey and public opinion research.  A renowned survey statistician, Stoop has significantly advanced the understanding of non-response in surveys and has been instrumental in developing and consolidating survey research infrastructures.

Throughout her illustrious career, Stoop served as the head of the Methodology department at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) and from the beginning was involved in the European Social Survey (ESS), where she played a pivotal role as Deputy Director of Methodology. She also chaired the European Statistical Advisory Committee and contributed to numerous national and international data infrastructure initiatives.

Stoop’s academic journey includes studying Methods and Statistics at Leiden University and earning her Ph.D. from Utrecht University in 2005. Her doctoral thesis, focusing on survey nonresponse, was published as a highly cited book, “The Hunt for the Last Respondent: Nonresponse in Sample Surveys.” She has authored and co-authored numerous influential publications, including “Improving Survey Response: Lessons from the European Social Survey.“

Her contributions have earned her membership in the International Statistical Institute and the 2019 ESRA Award for Outstanding Service to European Survey Research. Even after her retirement in 2019, Stoop continues to impact the field through teaching, advisory roles, and active involvement in research integrity initiatives.

Ineke Stoop’s dedication, expertise, and innovative contributions make her a deserving recipient of the WAPOR Helen Dinerman Award, celebrating her lasting impact on survey research and methodology.

For her leadership and extraordinary accomplishments, and for her continuous and wide-ranging impact, WAPOR is proud to honor Ineke Stoop with the 2024 WAPOR Helen Dinerman Award.

WAPOR Asia Pacific Lifetime Award

The WAPOR Asia Pacific Chapter Lifetime Achievement Award acknowledges an individual for their extraordinary and sustained contributions to the field of public opinion research within the Asia Pacific region. This prestigious award celebrates a career characterized by innovative research, impactful insights, and a profound dedication to advancing the understanding and practice of public opinion measurement. It recognizes a lifetime of excellence and leadership in shaping the field and influencing the industry’s development. Thank you to this year’s review committee, including Linda Luz Guerrero, Matthew Gray, Jibum Kim, Yashwant Deshmukh, and Syed Idid.

WAPOR Asia Pacific Chapter is pleased to present the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award to Hyunho Seok. Emeritus Professor Hyunho Seok at Sungkyunkwan University has been a true pioneer in the realm of social science research methodology. His extensive work and dedication have not only profoundly impacted the understanding and development of social indicators and survey statistics in Korea but have also inspired a generation of researchers to push the boundaries of their field. Professor Seok was instrumental in designing and launching the “Korean General Social Survey” in 2003. This survey has become the foundation for understanding the stability and change of Korean society in the 21st century and a cornerstone for social science research in Korea.

In 2006, he founded the Korea Social Science Data Archive (KOSSDA), a non-profit institution specializing in social science data archiving. This open access has fostered data preservation, dissemination, and the establishment of a robust data-sharing network, allowing everyone to participate in the research community in Korea. Professor Seok’s contributions do not end here. He has led pivotal research on Korean social trends, including the landmark “Korean Social Trends” report, published jointly by KOSSDA and Statistics Korea. This report has played a crucial role in identifying policy needs, cementing Professor Seok’s legacy in advancing the significance of social surveys.

Professor Seok, your tireless dedication, innovative spirit, and profound impact on social science research have left an indelible mark on the field. We are incredibly grateful for your contributions and proud to honor you with this Lifetime Achievement Award.

Sponsorship

WAPOR 77th annual conference is a great opportunity to showcase your products and services to key decision makers in the international survey and public opinion industry. It also provides the opportunity to meet colleagues, share the latest best practices, and promote survey innovation throughout the world. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for us, as an organization, to show our members which organizations support the mission and ideals of WAPOR. Take a moment to look at this year’s sponsorship prospect (Sponsorship prospect 2024). More information on the available sponsorship packages, exhibition and underwriting opportunities is available at the WAPOR website. If you have an idea for an exclusive underwriting opportunity that is not listed, please contact WAPOR Executive Director Dr. Kseniya Kizilova at waporoffice@gmail.com.

WAPOR expresses our sincere gratitude to our sponsors for their support: Seoul Metropolitan Government; Ministry of Unification; Center for Social Value Enhancement Studies; D3 Design Data Decisions; Gallup Korea; Hankook Research; K-stat; Jason TG; Langer Research Associates; Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan; Gallup International; NORC at the University of Chicago; Research& Research; Survey Research Lanka; Westat; KODAQS; Roper Center.

WAPOR Conference Committee 2024

Chair: Wolfgang Aschauer, Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria

Members:

  • Timothy Johnson, NORC at the University of Chicago, USA
  • Jibum Kim, Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea
  • Kseniya Kizilova, Executive Director of WAPOR, Austria
  • Henning Silber, GESIS, Germany
  • Olga Kamenchuk, Northwestern University, USA

Local Organizing Committee 2024

Chair: Jibum Kim, Sungkyunkwan University

Members: 

  • Doo Sup Youn, National Research Council
  • Dukjin Chang, Korean Sociological Association
  • U-Seok Seo, Korean Association for Survey Research
  • Wonho Park, KOSSDA, Seoul National University
  • Yun-Suk Lee, University of Seoul
  • Dong-Kyun Im, ISDPR, Seoul National University
  • Seulki Choi, KDI School of Public Policy and Management
  • Minhee Cho, PMI