Dr Paul J. Lavrakas

Senior Methodological Adviser

Paul is a research psychologist and research methodologist, during the past four decades has conducted research, written many articles and books about research, and taught about social research methods. He was elected to serve as AAPO’s President in 2012-2013. In 2019 Paul received the American Association of Public Opinion Research’s highest accolade: the Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement and was winner of the 2021 AAPOR Book Award with Margaret R. Roller for Applied Qualitative Research Design: A Total Quality Framework Approach and was winner of the AAPOR 2003 Innovator’s Award with Tom Smith and Rob Daves for their creation of the AAPOR Standard Definitions Manual for the calculation of survey final dispositions and response rates. He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor at University of Illinois, and is a retired Full Professor from Northwestern University and Ohio State University

He joined the NORC at the University of Chicago in 2014 as a Senior Fellow, where he is heavily involved in helping to create its new probability-based online panel, AmeriSpeak. His work at NORC also involves devising experiments to raise response and consent rates, and to lower total survey costs.

Paul is a member of the POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy Research Scientific Advisory Board and was the founding faculty director for the survey centres at Northwestern U. and Ohio State Uy. 1982-1996. From 2000-2007 he served as chief methodologist for Nielsen Media Research.