Standards and scoring to increase transparency for archived public opinion data

Abstract

Faced with increased diversification of methodologies in the polling industry, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research Center is embarking on a major initiative aimed at increasing methodological transparency across the field of public opinion survey research by increasing minimum disclosure requirements and providing users with transparency scoring for new submissions to the archive.

Roper Center, the world’s largest archive of public opinion survey data, has long enforced disclosure requirements for archival submissions based on transparency standards developed by professional organizations in the polling industry, particularly the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Roper Center’s new requirements and scoring mechanism expand longstanding policies and procedures to better meet the challenges of today’s research environment.
In this paper, Roper Center’s new standards will be described in the context of the historical development of transparency expectations in the polling community. The paper presentation will also detail the implementation process, providing an account of how standards were translated into actionable DDI-based metadata to drive an automatic scoring system, how new workflows were developed with input from data providers to facilitate maximum disclosure, and how the display of the user interface was designed to ensure the transparency information can be easily viewed and understood.