UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and California Health Interview Survey staff will be featured at the 80th Annual American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Conference, which will be held May 14–16, 2025, in St. Louis.
Each year, AAPOR — the leading professional organization of public opinion and survey research professionals in the United States — brings together experts from around the country to learn about the latest updates and trends in the field and discuss how data collection and measurement can advance inclusion and equity.
This year’s theme, “Reshaping Democracy’s Oracle: Transforming Polls, Surveys, and the Measurement of Public Opinion in the Age of AI,” will focus on the promises and perils that artificial intelligence and our information technology landscape have in changing political polling and survey research.
From the importance of federal data on transgender and gender expansive populations to improving response rates using visible cash incentives in the California Health Interview Survey, staff will present four sessions during the AAPOR conference.
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Panel
Nonbinary By Another Name? What Adding a “Nonbinary” Response Option Tells Us about (Trans)Gender Identity
3:45 p.m.– 5:15 p.m. CDT | Midway Suite 10, St. Louis Union Station Hotel
Tara Becker (presenter), Todd Hughes, Ninez A. Ponce
Session: Words Matter: Innovations in SOGI Question Wording
This session will explore how offering California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) respondents the option to choose “nonbinary” has affected measurement of the size of the nonbinary population and transgender and gender expansive communities, which remains challenging as terminology around gender identity continues to evolve.
Paper
Using Visible Cash to Improve Response in the California Health Interview Survey: Evidence from Two Experiments
3:45 p.m.–5:15 p.m. CDT | Regency A, St. Louis Union Station Hotel
Jiangzhou Fu (presenter), Xinyu Zhang, Todd Hughes, Royce Park, Margie Engle-Bauer (SSRS)
Session: Cash on Display, Data in Hand: Studies of Visible Cash and Early Bird Incentives
In this paper, attendees will learn about the results from the 2024 California Health Interview Survey’s experiments using a $2 visible cash incentive compared with a $2 non-visible cash incentive. The first experiment measured effectiveness in the initial recruitment of adolescents aged 12–17. The second measured how the incentive affected converting adult partial interviews to completes.
Poster
Straightlining in Web Surveys: Comparing Grids on PCs with Item-By-Item Formats on Smartphones
2:45 p.m.–3:45 p.m. CDT | Midway East, West, St. Louis Union Station Hotel
Xinyu Zhang (presenter), Jiangzhou Fu, Todd Hughes
Session: Poster Session I
This session will dive into a recently emerging, critically important question for people who conduct surveys: How does the growing proportion of respondents completing surveys on smartphones affect data collection? Since grids are generally discouraged on small screens, many survey software systems have automatically turned grids into item-by-item formats for smartphones.
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Panel
The Importance of Federal Data on Transgender and Gender Expansive Populations for Research and Policy
11:00 a.m.– 12:30 p.m. CDT | Midway Suite 10, St. Louis Union Station Hotel
Tara Becker (presenter)
Session: Impact of Two 2025 Executive Orders on Access to Federal Data on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
This presentation will explore how accurate federal data collection efforts on sex and gender are critical to advance research on health and other disparities for transgender and gender expansive populations, as well as how politically motivated redefinitions of sex and gender undermine data quality more broadly.
In 2024, AAPOR honored the UCLA CHPR and CHIS with its Inclusive Voices Award in recognition of more than two decades of work advancing data equity. The award recognizes the important data sets, research, and survey methods that have improved the ability to study complex social phenomena related to understudied populations. The award was presented at the AAPOR 79th annual conference in Atlanta.
The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research (CHPR) is one of the nation’s leading health policy research centers and the premier source of health policy information for California. UCLA CHPR improves the public’s health through high quality, objective, and evidence-based research and data that informs effective policymaking. UCLA CHPR is the home of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) and is part of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and affiliated with the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.