Benjamin Schapiro

The Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research (MAPOR) invites eligible students to enter the association’s MAPOR Fellows Student Paper Competition. Two winning papers, the Doris A. Graber Award in Public Opinion, and the Allan L. McCutcheon Award in Survey Research Methodology, will receive $500 and one free conference registration. The winning papers also will be accepted for presentation during a session at the May 2026 AAPOR conference.

2025 Student Paper Competition

DEADLINE: September 30, 2025.

To be eligible for the award, students must submit a full paper for review to by the date above.

a) Criteria: The topic of the paper must fall under one or both of MAPOR’s general areas of scholarship, which are (1) public opinion and (2) research methods in public opinion and survey research. When submitting, the author(s) must indicate the topic for which the paper should be considered. The papers need not be quantitative, nor must they report data to qualify for consideration in this competition. Each student may be an author on only one paper submitted to the competition. Papers up to 6,500 words excluding the abstract, tables, figures, and references. The papers will be judged based on the quality of research design, originality, significance, organization, and presentation.

b) Eligibility: To be eligible to enter the student paper competition, students :

  1. Must be enrolled in a graduate or undergraduate program at the time of submission OR received a graduate or undergraduate degree in Winter/Spring/Summer of the award year. Students need not be members of MAPOR but are expected to present at MAPOR of the award year. 
  • Cannot have already won a MAPOR Student Paper Award as an author or co-author.
  • Cannot submit the same paper over multiple years.
  • Papers submitted to this competition should be primarily students’ work, although student author(s) are encouraged to seek advice from a faculty mentor or mentors. This does not preclude recognizing the faculty mentor as a co-author on a later paper that is based on or incorporates some of the work in the student paper. In most cases, the student would be the first author on such a later publication. In cases where faculty mentor(s) are co-authors, in addition to completing the faculty form (see below), a letter must be provided by the faculty mentor or mentors affirming that the student wrote the paper submitted and describing the role(s) the student(s) and faculty played on the paper following Contributors Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) guidelines found here.

c) Award: Each award winner will receive $500 and one free MAPOR conference registration to attend the 2025 MAPOR conference and present their paper.  Additionally, the author(s) of the winning paper will be expected to present their research with a guaranteed spot on the Conference Program at the 81st Annual AAPOR National Conference (2026). 

d) Award Committee: The winning paper and honorable mentions (if applicable) will be selected by a review committee composed of last year’s MAPOR fellow, previous MAPOR fellows, and invited subject-matter reviewers who are MAPOR members.

e) Submission Procedure:

1. Submit an abstract to the MAPOR conference at mapor.org. In addition to a title and abstract, you will be asked to provide all authors’ names, institutional affiliations, and email addresses. Students must provide one or more faculty mentor’s name and e-mail address when submitting their abstract. Abstracts can be submitted until _____.

2. Students who have been accepted for the 2025 conference can have their papers considered for the MAPOR Student Paper Competition.  Here are the requirements:

  • Follow AAPOR Code of Professional Ethics & Practices and make sure this information is included in the appropriate places in the manuscript. (Please pay particular attention to the disclosure elements in Section III).
  • A blinded version of the manuscript must be submitted, wherein all identifiable information about the author(s) and faculty members, acknowledgments, funding information, and other identifiable information is removed or redacted from the manuscript.
  • The blinded manuscript must contain the abstract, the body of the paper, all references, all tables and figures, and any appendices.
  • If possible, limit self-citations, and, if using, include them in the third person.
  • A separate title page containing all author information, including name(s), University affiliation, acknowledgments, funding information, contact information, word count, and the title of the paper.
  • Submit all documents in either Word or PDF format.
  • Provide the contact information for a faculty mentor/co-author. If you do not have a faculty mentor, please choose a faculty mentor who will review and attest that the paper submission to ensure it meets professional standards of readability, grammar, and so forth. This ensures that the reviewers can attend to the substance of the paper.
  • The faculty mentor that the student identifies will also be sent an email asking them to complete an online form which must be completed for a student to be eligible to win the competition. This form will ask them to:
    • List the name of the student entering the competition;
    • Confirm that the submission meets professional standards; and
    • Briefly describe the student’s or students’ role and contributions to the paper following theContributors Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) guidelines found here.
  • A member of MAPOR’s executive board will reach out to all students after the abstract submission deadline to confirm details for paper submission to the competition.
  • Full papers must be submitted to MAPOR by September 30th, 2025, by 11:59 PM Central Time.

Winners will be announced at the Friday Awards Session at the MAPOR conference.

It is possible that in any given year, the committee may determine that no paper meets the threshold for granting an award.

Questions may be addressed to either Mary Losch (mary.losch@uni.edu) or Curtiss Engstrom (cwengstr@umich.edu).