The World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) will hold its 66th annual conference on May 14-16, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts.  The conference space will be located on the campus of Boston University.  The theme of this conference is: “Revolutions in the Measurement of World Public Opinion”.  This theme is inspired by three sources:
1)  The city hosting the conference: Boston.  Boston has been the center of many revolutions over the years, most notably that which resulted in the independence of the American colonies from England, paving the way toward the eventual creation of the United States of America.
2)  The emergence of alternative approaches for capturing public opinion: Since 2010, there has been a series of studies that demonstrate that public opinion can be captured in ways that significantly differ from the established methods that have been traditionally used.  Known as “Sentiment Analysis” or “Opinion Mining”, these studies consist of automated content analyses of social media postings found on microblogging sites.  What impacts will these types of analyses have on the future of world public opinion measurement?

3)  The exponential growth in the expression of opinion by increasingly larger numbers of people around the world:  For the first time in the history of human civilization, we are witnessing more people being given the opportunity to express their opinions (as a function of the epic-scale revolutions in Egypt and other countries of North Africa) and more technological tools that allow them to express their opinions (e.g. social networking sites, microblogging sites, smart phones, etc.).  How will these newly found freedoms of expression, widely diffused information technologies, and enormous volumes of opinion expressions impact the measurement of world public opinion?

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