In January 2005, I started Public Opinion Pros after having served as the last editor of Public Perspective, a print magazine published for fourteen years by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. I had realized, I wrote in POP’s preview issue, that in the year since Public Perspective had ended, no one had come forward to fill the void its demise had left in the field of public opinion. I also needed to find something to occupy my spare time before somebody tried to make me do housework.
So I started this magazine.
Three years and thirty-three issues later, I still think there is a void to be filled by a periodical like Public Opinion Pros, one that remains despite the flourishing of other fine online publications like Pollster.com and PollingReport.com and plans by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) to start an online journal of its own. And I still think that web-based publishing, with its amazing capacity for flexibility and interactive learning and teaching, is the only way to go.
But three years is a long time to be producing an ambitious publication like POP, mostly alone; and, frankly, I’m tired, and ready to be doing other things. I’d like to get back to my own writing—maybe a monograph on medical journals in Victorian England, or an in-depth analysis of TV fan fiction on the web, or a handbook on how to write in English for people whose first language is academic. I’d like to tutor kids at the local high school, and find an aging rock band (perhaps somewhat hearing-impaired) that will let me sing backup. I’d even like to tend to the good china, which has been looking a bit dusty lately, and reorganize the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Somehow, the housework doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to be doing anymore.
So this is it for Public Opinion Pros. The magazine wasn’t always all I’d hoped it would be, but it was often fun, and with the help of a lot of enthusiastic and extraordinarily generous authors from the field we produced, on the whole, rather an impressive body of work. Those past issues will continue to be available on this website, at least for awhile, and I hope that practitioners and students of public opinion and survey research will continue make use of POP's glossary, bibliography, and links pages, and perhaps drop me an email now and again, just to say hey. I ask only that the pollsters among you will think of POP the next time you need to talk about public opinion in a way that ordinary people can understand.
And don’t forget to include me in your random samples—I really like taking surveys.
—Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Editor
Interested in taking over Public Opinion Pros? I'd like to hear from you. Please contact me at editor@PublicOpinionPros, and we'll talk. |
