2DkcTXceO

146 Statistics in service to the nationIn the 1980s and again in the 1990s, I was a member of a CNSTAT paneladdressing this and other methodological issues. Several authors during thisperiod wrote about multiple-system estimation in the census context. I wasone of these authors, a topic to which I contributed.Political pressure and lawsuits have thwarted the use of this methodologyas a formal part of the census. Much of this story is chronicled in my 1999book with Margo Anderson, “Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking inContemporary America” (Anderson and Fienberg, 1999). In conjunction withthe 2000 decennial census, the Bureau used related log-linear methodology toproduce population estimates from a collection of administrative lists. Thiswork was revived following the 2010 census. In the meantime, I and others haveproduced several variants on the multiple-recapture methodology to deal withpopulation heterogeneity, and I have a current project funded by the CensusBureau and the National Science Foundation that is looking once again atways to use these more elaborate approaches involving multiple lists for bothenumeration and census accuracy evaluation.I’m especially proud of the fact that the same tools have now emergedas major methodologies in epidemiology in the 1990s (IWG, 1995a,b) andin human rights over the past decade (Ball and Asher, 2002). This is anamazing and unexpected consequence of work begun in a totally differentform as a consequence of the National Halothane Study and the methodologyit spawned.13.5 Cognitive aspects of survey methodologyOne of the things one learns about real sample surveys is that the measurementproblems, especially those associated with questionnaire design, are immense.IlearnedthisfirsthandwhileworkingwithdatafromtheNationalCrimeSurvey and as a technical advisor to the National Commission on Employmentand Unemployment Statistics, both in the 1970s. These matters rarely, if ever,show up in the statistics classroom or in textbooks, and they had long beenviewed as a matter of art rather than science.Triggered by a small 1980 workshop on victimization measurement andcognitive psychology, I proposed that the NRC sponsor a workshop on cognitiveaspects of survey measurement that would bring together survey specialists,government statisticians, methodologically oriented statisticians, andcognitive scientists. My motivation was simple: the creative use of statisticalthinking could suggest new ways of carrying out interviews that ultimatelycould improve not only specific surveys, but the field as a whole. Under theleadership of Judy Tanur and Miron Straf, the Committee on National Statisticshosted such a workshop in the summer of 1983 and it produced a widelycitedvolume (Jabine et al., 1984), as well as a wide array of unorthodox ideas