seeds of change

During orientation I was warned I might have a few weeks of down time. Thankfully (or perhaps not so thankfully for this lazy sack), that down time did not materialize. Early last week a stakeholder in the survey I was hired to help create and manage decided to call a meeting of stakeholders to review the questionnaire. Never mind the deadline, given the survey timeline and tight budget, for offering comments on the questionnaire in time for pilot testing had passed two months prior. The experts in the meeting room, many of whom had never actually conducted a survey, were full of ideas about what we should be asking on the questionnaire. They asked for all sorts of questions, as they tend to do, ivory tower types who think that Americans are just waiting at home, twiddling their thumbs, eager to complete complex government surveys about their personal lives and finances. As someone who's had a foot in both worlds, both as a statistician at the Census Bureau and a researcher at a trade association, I feel like I understand both sides better than most. As a data user, I know how frustrating it is to be looking for data and finding it doesn't exist, or if it does exist, that it's packaged in such a hard-to-use format it might not exist at all.

So I spent my first full week at work trying to bridge the gap between the stakeholders who wanted all these questions and the worker bees at Census who were going to have to review and change the questionnaires. I relied primarily on my looks and charm yet by some miracle actually found that they sufficed. Still I hope such fire drills are not part of my routine.

In the process of managing this unexpected wrench, I became reacquainted with the Census Bureau. It had been more than seven years since I'd worked there last. The building is completely new -- the old, carcinogenic and otherwise toxic buildings have since been demolished. The promise of a new building was all that gave employees hope. The new building had some kinks and I know it disappointed many, although I find myself pleasantly surprised by the features and how conducive it is to working. I also had the chance to see how the bureau has made some progress on some key issues that challenged the agency -- stovepiping in survey development, lack of documentation, haphazard and unequal security measures, lack of quality control. The Demographic Surveys Division has created a checklist for those creating new surveys, to make sure that all new surveys have standard documentation and procedures.

The bureau is creating a new area that will be focusing on quality control. In several of the demographic surveys the bureau needed to re-release some of its data sets because errors were found after they were released. Unfortunately when budgets were tight, the Census Bureau didn't have the resources to have the statisticians themselves develop research topics wherein they could test drive the data. The truth is sometimes it is difficult to spot errors in data, whatever quality checks you perform, unless you actually embark on a research project and have to use the data to answer a research question.

As a lowly functionary, I used to complain occasionally to senior management about some of the issues I saw in the trenches. I didn't think they were paying attention. I'm glad to see that they were.