Upcoming Events
January 14, 2022
12:30 – 4:00pm
The Consensus Panel on Evaluation and Improvements to the Supplemental Poverty Measure will hold a public meeting on measuring resources; see here for more information.
People News
Passing of Ruth Ann Killion, Sara McLanahan, and Gooloo Wunderlich
CNSTAT mourns the loss of three distinguished members of the federal statistical, policy analysis, and research communities:
- Ruth Ann Killion died at her home in Lanham, Maryland on November 23, 2021, at the age of 72. She had a long and productive career at the U.S. Census Bureau serving among other positions as chief of the Statistical Research Division and Decennial Statistical Studies Division and director of the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Planning. She was a fellow of the American Statistical Association and had a B.S. in mathematics and psychology from Millikin University and an M.S. in statistics and psychology from Florida State University.
- Sara McLanahan, William S. Tod professor of sociology and public affairs emerita, at Princeton University, died in New York City on December 30, 2021, at age 81. She was the founding director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW) at Princeton and principal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. She was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She served on many National Academies’ studies, including CNSTAT consensus panels that produced The National Children’s Study 2014: An Assessment (2014) and Monitoring Educational Equity (2019). She received her B.A. from the University of Houston and her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas.
- Gooloo S. Wunderlich died December 21, 2021, at age 91 at her home in Springfield, Virginia. She had two distinguished careers. The first was at the Department of Health and Human Services where her last position was director of the Division of Data Policy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. Her second career was as a senior program officer at the National Academies, including stints with the Institute of Medicine and CNSTAT. She directed numerous studies for CNSTAT on such topics as measuring food insecurity and hunger, reviewing the National Children’s Study research plan, new measures of disability, and improving health care cost projections for the Medicare population. She was an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Bombay, India, and completed postdoctoral studies in sociology and demography at the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago.
Robert Santos Sworn in as Census Bureau’s 26th Director
Robert (Rob) Santos was sworn in on January 5, 2022, as director of the U.S. Census Bureau for a 5-year term, becoming the first Latino person to serve in the role. He was previously: vice president, chief methodologist, and director of the Statistical Methods Group at the Urban Institute; executive vice president and partner of NuStats, a social science research firm in Austin, Texas; vice president of statistics and methodology and director of survey operations at NORC at the University of Chicago; director of survey operations at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan; and senior study director and sampling statistician at Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research. He served as the 2021 president of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is an ASA Fellow and recipient of the ASA Founder’s Award. He was the 2014 president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and received the AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement. He is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and served from 2017 to 2020 as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics. He was a longtime member of the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly. He served on a number of CNSTAT studies, including consensus panels that produced Measuring What We Spend: Toward a New Consumer Expenditure Survey (2013) and Realizing the Potential of the American Community Survey: Challenges, Tradeoffs, and Opportunities (2015). He has a B.A. in mathematics from Trinity University in San Antonio and an M.A. in statistics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Alexia Cooper New Chief of Bureau of Justice Statistics Law Enforcement Statistics Unit
Alexia Cooper was announced on December 21, 2021, as the new chief of the Law Enforcement Statistics Unit at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Since joining BJS as a statistician in 2011, her work has covered many criminal justice topics, including offender recidivism, homicide, indigent defense, child sexual assault, and juvenile victimization. She is an expert in working with law enforcement administrative data collections and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program data. She also directed the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) and NCS-X National Estimation Project and was responsible for evaluating, designing, and implementing formula grant awards at the Office of Justice Programs. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology and her M.A. in social ecology from the University of California, Irvine, and her B.A. in psychology and anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Rebecca Blank to be Next President of Northwestern University
Rebecca (Becky) Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been announced as the next president and first woman president of Northwestern University, effective summer 2022. An internationally renowned economist, she is a well-known researcher on poverty and the low-income labor market. Her previous positions include director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research at Northwestern; inaugural dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan; senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton Administration; and acting secretary and deputy secretary of commerce in the Obama Administration. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. She has served on many National Academies’ studies and advisory boards, including as a member of the CNSTAT panel that produced Measuring Poverty: A New Approach (1995) and as chair of the CNSTAT panel that produced Measuring Racial Discrimination (2004). She has a B.A. in economics from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.
Recent Events and Reports
CNSTAT Seminar: Transparency in Statistical Information for Federal Agencies, December 17, 2021
Video and other materials coming soon to this site.
Toward a Vision for a New Data Infrastructure for Federal Statistics and Social and Economic Research in the 21st Century Workshop 1: The Scope, Components, and Characteristics of a 21st Century Data Infrastructure, December 9 and 16, 2021
Video and other materials available from this site.
Improving Consent and Response Rates in Longitudinal Studies on Aging Workshop, September 27-28, 2021
Video and other materials available from this site.
Research and Development, Global Value Chains, and Globalization Measurement Public Workshop, May 5-7, 2021
Video and other materials available from this site.
CNSTAT Seminar: Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency, April 21, 2021
Video available here.
REMINDER: Slides from previous CNSTAT public seminars are available on the CNSTAT public seminars page.
Transparency in Statistical Information for the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and All Federal Statistical Agencies, a consensus report chaired by Daniel Kasprzyk (NORC) and sponsored by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), was released November 18, 2021. Free PDFs are available here.
Widely available, trustworthy government statistics are essential for policy makers and program administrators at all levels of government, for private sector decision makers, for researchers, and for the media and the public. In the United States, principal statistical agencies as well as units and programs in many other agencies produce various key statistics in areas ranging from the science and engineering enterprise to education and economic welfare. Official statistics are often the result of complex data collection, processing, and estimation methods. These methods can be challenging for agencies to document and for users to understand. The goal of transparency is to enable consumers of federal statistics to accurately understand and evaluate how estimates are generated.
Transparency in Statistical Information for the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and All Federal Statistical Agencies examines the degree to which the information currently provided by NCSES and the other federal statistical agencies is consistent with the goals of being transparent. The panel identified best practices that agencies can use to determine the extent to which their policies are consistent with transparency. The report also explores how NCSES could work with other federal statistical agencies to facilitate the adoption of currently available documentation and archiving standards and tools.
Building Data Capacity for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research: Interim Report 2—Data Standards, Methods, and Policy, was released October 27, 2021. Free PDFs are available here.
Building Data Capacity for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research: Interim Report 1—Looking Ahead at Data Needs was released September 10, 2021. Free PDFs are available here. Both are consensus reports chaired by George Isham (HealthPartners Institute) and sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), ASPE, in partnership with other agencies and divisions of DHHS, coordinates a portfolio of projects that build data capacity for conducting patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR). PCOR focuses on producing scientific evidence on the effectiveness of prevention and treatment options to inform the health care decisions of patients, families, and health care providers, taking into consideration the preferences, values, and questions patients face when making health care choices. ASPE asked the National Academies to appoint a consensus study committee to identify issues critical to the continued development of the data infrastructure for PCOR over the next decade.
As part of its information gathering activities, the committee organized three workshops to collect input from stakeholders on the PCOR data infrastructure. The first interim report focused on data user needs over the next decade; the second interim report focused on data standards methods, and policies that could make the PCOR data more useful in the years ahead.
Other News and Events
OMB issues final decisions for 2022 NAICS
The Office of Management and Budget published a notice announcing its final decisions on the 2022 revisions to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) on December 21, 2021. The notice is available at the following link: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-12-21/pdf/2021-27536.pdf