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Register for the event here:
https://emersoncmc.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bqg9IPNrjBzUjl4
Join NEAAPOR for an engaging webinar featuring public opinion experts Kathleen Frankovic, Gary Langer, and Don Levy, as we delve into the dynamic relationship between media and public opinion polls. This session will offer an in-depth exploration of how polls are reported, the varying standards they are held to, and the implications for the survey research industry.
Panelists
Kathleen Frankovic spent more than three decades at CBS News as the point person for the CBS News Poll and the CBS News polling collaboration with The New York Times. As Director of Surveys and a Producer at CBS News, she was responsible for the design, management and reporting of those polls, working with journalists and frequently appearing on television and radios as an analyst of poll results. After the 2000 election, she was placed in charge of the network’s Election Night decision team, and successfully projected election results for elections from 2002 to 2008. She retired from full-time work at CBS News in 2009, but since then has been an Election and Polling consultant for CBS News, YouGov, Harvard University, Open Society Foundations and other survey research organizations.
She has served as President of both the World Association for Public Opinion and the American Association for Public Opinion Research and has won many national awards for her work conducting and explaining public opinion for the news media, including the 2008 AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement, that association’s highest honor, and the 2011 Roper Center Mitofsky Award, for Excellence in Public Opinion Research.
She chaired the committees that wrote the 2014 revision of the ESOMAR/WAPOR guide to Opinion Polls and the WAPOR guide to Exit Polls and Election Forecasts. She currently sits on the ESOMAR Professional Standards Committee and has been the ESOMAR representative on two collaborations on the freedom to conduct and publish election polls. She chaired the OSF-sponsored review of 2012 pre-election polling in the Republic of Georgia and that organization’s 2015 evaluation of polling in Myanmar. Frankovic served on the committee evaluating the 2000 CBS News election coverage and the use of data in election forecasting.
She writes and lectures extensively on topics like the history of polling in the media, its importance in modern day journalism, survey quality, and the gender gap. A former academic, she holds a Rutgers University Ph.D. in political science, a subject she taught at the University of Vermont before joining CBS News in 1977 (her undergraduate degree is from Cornell University) She has been a visiting professor at Cornell University, and Professional in Residence at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. Some of her writing can be found at her website: www.kathyfrankovic.com. Her YouGov analyses can be found at https://today.yougov.com/people/kathyf.
Gary Langer is an internationally recognized public opinion researcher with expertise in analysis of political, policy, economic and social attitudes, questionnaire design and survey methodology and management. With more than 30 years in the field, Langer, a longtime director of polling at ABC News, has overseen and analyzed many hundreds of surveys on a broad range of topics.
Langer has won four News Emmy awards – the first and only to cite public opinion polls – and received 12 Emmy nominations. He was honored with the 2010 Policy Impact Award of the American Association for Public Opinion Research for a series of surveys in Afghanistan and Iraq, described in AAPOR’s citation as “a stellar example of high-impact public opinion polling at its finest.” He’s a two-time winner of the University of Iowa-Gallup Award for Excellent Journalism Using Polls, produced a pair of ABC News polls recognized by the Excellence in Media Coverage of Polls Award from the National Council on Public Polls and shared a DuPont-Columbia Award for ABC’s 9/11 coverage. Langer and his colleagues shared a 2015 David R. Ogilvy Award for Excellence in Advertising Research with ESPN and its partner research firms for their work on fan interest in the College Football Playoffs.
Langer created ABC’s industry-leading poll standards and vetting procedures and has promoted disclosure initiatives through various professional organizations. He’s authored or co-authored nearly 30 scholarly papers or book chapters and given scores of invited presentations on the meaning and measurement of public attitudes.
Langer is vice chair of the Board of Directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, U.S. national representative for the World Association of Public Opinion Research and chair of its special committee on transparency, a former trustee of the National Council on Public Polls and past president of the New York chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. He’s a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of New Hampshire.
Don Levy currently serves as the director of the Siena College Research Institute (SCRI). Levy came to Siena in August of 2007 and has been instrumental in focusing Siena’s polling not only on local, statewide and national politics but also on economy and a broad range of social and cultural issues.
In addition to supervising SCRI’s political and economic polling, Levy has conducted studies while at Siena on the implications of economic downturns, civic engagement, community well-being, the opioid crisis, shared American values, charitable giving, and sports fanship. Levy has led Siena’s polling conducted in partnership with the New York Times since 2012 and been instrumental in disruptive likely voter modeling and unique real-time data presentations. A frequent guest on television, internet streaming platforms, radio and public venues, Levy continues to work in partnership with major media partners including the New York Times, C-SPAN, Bloomberg News, Newsday, the Albany Times Union and the Buffalo News.
Levy holds a Ph.D., in Sociology from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. from Yale University.
