Presidential Address: Survey and Market Research Confront Their Futures on the World Wide Web

Although I have been attending AAPOR’s annual conferences for the past 23 years, over the past three days here in St. Louis, I have sensed a climate of thought quite unlike anything I had previously experienced at an AAPOR conference. I can recall, for example, conferences following national elections whose outcomes had been called close to the mark by most of the major polling organizations. These conferences had an air of self-satisfaction about them—a sense of ‘‘ain’t surveys grand!’’ I can also recall conferences filled with intellectual angst, as in: ‘‘Focus groups are coming—can survey research be saved?’’ And I can recall conferences with considerable personal angst, as in ‘‘Computer-assisted telephone interviewing is coming—might I lose my job?’’ What I sense here in St. Louis, however, at this, our fifty-third annual conference still in progress, is an atmosphere unprecedented but unmistakable, something like: ‘‘The world is in flux, major changes are afoot, and I have little real sense of what the eventual outcome might be—whether the results of these changes will be mostly good or mostly bad, for me or for AAPOR.’’ One culprit behind this prevailing air of tentative hesitation, caution, and uncertainty, it seems to me, is the sudden emergence of the World Wide Web, which has popped up here, there, and everywhere at this conference, often where least expected, like a poltergeist in the pantry. This might be, of course, only the early arrival of ‘‘millennial fever,’’ a putative affliction which we all must be on guard against, once every thousand years. Nevertheless, I, at least, attribute the prevailing atmosphere here in St. Louis to another type of fever, World Wide Web fever, now spreading out of control, or so it would seem, worldwide. As evidence, consider that, at Thursday night’s opening plenary ses-