WAPOR 76th Annual Conference: Public Opinion Research in a Technology-Driven World

WAPOR 76th Annual Conference: Public Opinion Research in a Technology-Driven World

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 - Fri, 22 Sep 2023

Salzburg, Austria

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Organized by: World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR)


Contact: waporoffice@gmail.com

The World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) is delighted to announce that our 76th Annual Conference will take place on September 19-22, 2023 in Salzburg, Austria. This year’s WAPOR annual meeting will be hosted by the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg. Accepted presentation formats: paper, poster, panel. Submissions are due by April 23, 2023.

Conference Theme: ​Public Opinion Research in a Technology-Driven World

​Although the availability of internet access remains far from adequate in many low-income countries around the world, internet technologies have transformed the practice of politics and commerce in the societies in which they are used, with consumers, candidates, parties and politicians interacting online. Affordances (such as sharing, liking, commenting, and a range of emotions) provided by social media platforms provide massive amounts of data for research on public engagement with information online. Misinformation — false information and fake news especially in the context of disasters, crises and elections — remain a problem online and off in many countries.  The internet is just one example of a technology driving commerce and social change. Next to sea level rise and climate change mitigation, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing present the greatest challenges to global governance.  

Given the challenges and opportunities for society presented by rapidly accelerating technologies, what does the latest public opinion research tell us about the issues of importance today? What can we learn from public opinion and elite opinion over time?  What are the latest developments in public opinion research, misinformation, and the study of campaigning and voting behavior? 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 — topic modeling, sentiment scoring, image analysis?

The 2023 conference theme is broad. It includes many newer topics relevant to public opinion research including e-voting, e-deliberation, e-panels, mixed mode studies, AI, social media research and methods, technologies and the UN’s sustainable development goals, as well as 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, and more. 

The upcoming conference presentations, posters, and panels will include topics related to substantive public opinion research and survey methodology, including qualitative methods. Examples of topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Public opinion and public diplomacy
  • Public opinion, policymaking and survey research
  • Public opinion, elections and voting
  • Political behavior, participation and culture in survey research
  • New sources of information on public opinion and the use of social media
  • Public opinion and misinformation
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges in public opinion research and survey methods
  • Public opinion and virtual reality
  • News, media, journalism and public opinion
  • Advertising Online, Media and Audience Research
  • Digitalization and new sources of information in survey research
  • Survey research applications
  • E-voting, e-deliberation, e-panels
  • Comparative research and International Survey Projects
  • Cross-cultural concerns in data collection and measurement issues
  • Big data, sentiment analysis and machine learning
  • Data visualization, new technologies and online surveys
  • Best practices for stakeholder research and expert surveys
  • Panel, longitudinal and national monitoring surveys in policymaking
  • Methodological challenges and improvements in the areas of sampling, measurement, survey design and survey response or non-response
  • Qualitative research