Faculty
William G. Axinn is the Director of the Survey Research Center, Professor of Sociology and Research Professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. He studies the relationships among social change, family organization, intergenerational relationships, marriage, cohabitation, and fertility in the United States and Nepal. His methodological work focuses on the construction of new data collection methods employing elements of survey, ethnographic, and archival techniques.
Steve Barnaby is a corporate and government mediation specialist. He has been a member of the facilitation team at the Michigan Prevention Research Center in the JOBs training program, serving as master trainer. During his tenure, he developed training protocols in conjunction with the research team, trained facilitators and delivered research protocols. He has trained JOBs facilitators in China, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden as well in various locations in the United States. He is a graduate of Wayne State University.
Patricia Berglund is a Senior Research Associate in the Survey Methodology Program at the Institute for Social Research. She has an extensive background in the use of computing systems for data management and analysis. In addition, she is involved in development, implementation, and teaching of analysis courses and computer training programs at the Survey Research Center/ISR. She is currently working on a variety of research projects including the Army STARRS project, the National Survey of Family Growth, and in the mental health field using data from the National Comorbidity Surveys, World Mental Health Surveys, and various other national and international surveys. She is also co-author of “Applied Survey Data Analysis” with Steve Heeringa and Brady West. Pat’s educational background includes an MBA and BA in Music, both from Northwestern University.
Paul Biemer is a Distinguished Fellow at RTI International and Associate Director for Survey Research at the University of North Carolina. He received a Ph.D. in statistics from Texas A & M University in 1978. Formerly, he was Head of the Department of Experimental Statistics and Director of the University Statistics Center at New Mexico State University, and was Assistant Chief of Statistical Research at the Bureau of the Census in Washington, D.C. His research interests include nonsampling error evaluation and analysis and general survey methodology.
Philip Brenner is Research Fellow in the Program on Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research interests are situated at the intersection of sociological social psychology and survey methodology, including identity processes in the survey interview, overreporting of socially desirable behaviors, time diary methods, and measurement of religiosity. His current research investigates the overreporting of religious service attendance in conventional sample surveys cross-nationally and over time.
Pamela Campanelli is a Survey Methods Consultant and U.K. Chartered Statistician Statistician and Chartered Scientist. She received her Ph.D. in statistics from the London School of Economics, and an M.A. in applied social research (survey methods) and B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan. Prior to starting her Survey Coach business (see The Survey Coach), she was a Research Associate at the Office of Educational Resources and Research at the University of Michigan, a Survey Statistician at the Center for Survey Methods Research at the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chief Research Officer at the UK Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, and Research Director at the Survey Methods Centre at the National Centre for Social Research, London. Her main interests and publications are in the study of survey error and data quality issues, with a special emphasis on questionnaire design, question testing strategies, and survey interviewing, nonresponse, and sampling. In addition to her consultancy work, she regularly teaches short courses for a variety of organizations, universities, government departments, and survey research companies in the UK as well as in Hong Kong, Australia, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, South Africa and for JPSM and the University of Michigan Summer Institute.
Frederick Conrad is a Research Professor in the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the University of Maryland. He is the director of the graduate programs at Michigan (Program in Survey Methodology) and Maryland (JPSM). He received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago. His current research includes adaptive user interfaces in web surveys, interviewer-respondent interaction, and data collection with mobile, multimodal devices.
Mick P. Couper is a Research Professor in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research and the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Rhodes University, an M.A. in applied social research from the University of Michigan and an M.Soc.Sc. from the University of Cape Town. His current research interests include survey nonresponse, design and implementation of survey data collection, effects of technology on the survey process, and computer-assisted survey methods, including both interviewer-administered (CATI and CAPI) and self-administered (web, audio-CASI, etc.) methods.
Robert Croninger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership in the College of Education at the University of Maryland. He received a Ph.D. in education studies from the University of Michigan in 1997. His research focuses on how school policies and practices influence the education of children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. He is currently studying how 4th and 5th grade teachers adjust their pedagogical practices to address different classroom structures, patterns of student performance, and changing policy priorities. His most recent work examines the policy environment that surrounds teachers, methodological issues associated with measuring differences in teacher practices, and the potential effects of teacher qualifications on early learning.
Edith de Leeuw is a lecturer in methods and statistics at Utrecht University College associate professor at the department of methodology and statistics at Utrecht University. She teaches international workshops on survey methods and data quality in Europe. She received a Ph.D. in survey methodology at the Inter-universities Graduate School in Psychometrics and Sociometrics, University of Amsterdam. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the Social and Economic Sciences Research Center of Washington State University and a visiting scholar at the Program on Social Statistics at UCLA. She co-authored books in the field of survey methodology and edited special issues of international journals. Her most recent publications focus on nonresponse, computer-assisted data collection, data quality, and interviewing special populations.
Mike Elliott is a Research Assistant Professor. He received a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2005, he held an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and prior to that as a Visiting Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and as a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Dr. Elliott's research interests include the design and analysis of sample surveys, U.S. Census undercount, and missing and latent variable data structures with applications to causal estimation and modeling. Dr. Elliott serves on the BRFSS Survey Oversight committee.
Robert M. Groves is senior research professor and director of the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research, as well as professor of sociology, all at the University of Michigan, and research professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Survey Errors and Survey Costs (Wiley, 1989); (with M. Couper) of Nonresponse in Household Interview Surveys (Wiley, 1998); (with R. Kahn) of Surveys By Telephone (Academic Press, 1979); chief editor of Telephone Survey Methodology (Wiley, 1988); a co-editor of Measurement Errors in Surveys (Wiley, 1991); chief editor of Survey Nonresponse (Wiley, 2002), and an author of many journal articles in survey methodology. His current research interests focus on theory-building in survey participation and models of nonresponse reduction and adjustment.
Steven G. Heeringa is a Research Scientist in the Survey Methodology Program, the Director of the Statistical and Research Design Group in the Survey Research Center, and the Director of the Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques at the Institute for Social Research. He has over 25 years of statistical sampling experience directing the development of the SRC National Sample design, as well as sample designs for SRC's major longitudinal and cross-sectional survey programs. During this period he has been actively involved in research and publication on sample design methods and procedures such as weighting, variance estimation, and the imputation of missing data that are required in the analysis of sample survey data. He has been a teacher of survey sampling methods to U.S. and international students and has served as a sample design consultant to a wide variety of international research programs based in countries such as Russia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, India, Nepal, China, Egypt, Iran, and Chile.
Joop Hox is a Professor of Social Science Methods at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He received a Ph.D. in social science at the University of Amsterdam. He is a member of the Netherlands Interuniversity Graduate School for Psychometric and Sociometric Research, and the International Statistical Institute. In 1990 he was a Fulbright scholar at UCLA, where he worked on multilevel modeling. His research interests are survey data quality and analyzing complex data structures. He has written on multi-level analysis and co-edited several books. He is co-editor of the April 1994 special issue of Sociological Methods and Research on Multi-level Analysis, and co-organizer of the biannual Amsterdam Multi-level Conference. Recently, he published Multilevel Analysis. Techniques and Applications. (Routledge, 2010). Some of his publications can be found on his homepage at http://www.joophox.net/.
Frauke Kreuter is an Assistant Professor of Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park. As faculty member of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology she has taught classes on questionnaire design, randomized and non randomized research design and analysis of survey data. Prior to joining the Maryland faculty in 2004, she served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on sampling and nonsampling errors in complex surveys; nonresponse, systematic measurement errors in survey response; and the application of latent variable methods for survey research. She is coeditor of Data Analysis using Stata.
Jinkook Lee is a senior economist at RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Before joining RAND, she was a professor at the Ohio State University and has held visiting positions at Federal Reserve Board and University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research expertise includes economics of aging, family economics, and consumer finances, with particular interests in health, retirement, and well-being of the elderly. Her recent publications focus on education gradients in health and their potential pathways in various policy environments and cultures, as well as health disparities across subpopulations in both developed and developing countries. She has developed several large-scale, multidisciplinary longitudinal studies and has been a co-principal investigator of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India since its inception. Dr. Lee leads the research network of the Health and Retirement Studies around the world and has developed the Survey Meta Data Repository with her colleagues at RAND.
Valerie Lee is a Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Michigan and a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Social Research. She received an Ed.D. from Harvard University in 1985. She has held research fellowships with the Educational Testing Service, the U.S. Department of Education, and at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Her research focuses on social equity in educational settings. This she explores through investigations of the social distribution of achievement within schools, as well as how characteristics of the social and academic organization of schools influence students' academic and social development. She uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in her work. Her current research focuses on issues of educational equity in early elementary school, school size, school-based social capital, high schools divided into schools-within-schools, and identifying characteristics of secondary schools that make them especially effective and equity in international settings (e.g., sub-Saharan African countries, Brazil and other Latin American countries). Her most recent book is Restructuring High Schools for Equity and Excellence: What Works, published in 2001 by Teachers College Press.
James M. Lepkowski is Research Professor at the Survey Research Center and Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. He is also Research Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1980. His research interests include sampling methods, methods for compensating for missing data, estimation strategies for complex sample survey data, and the effect of interviewer and respondent behavior on the quality of survey data.
Roderick Little is a professor of Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, having chaired the department from 1993 to 2001. Dr. Little earned his Ph.D. in statistics from London University, and he has taught or conducted research at UCLA, the United States Bureau of the Census, and the University of Chicago. His primary area of research interest is analysis of data with missing values. His applied interests include mental health, demography, environmental statistics, biology, economics and the social sciences as well as biostatistics.
Zeina Mneimneh is a survey director in Survey Research Operations, Institute for Social Research (ISR)-University of Michigan. Ms. Mneimneh has more than 10 years of experience in designing and conducting surveys in international settings. She was the director of the World Mental health survey in Lebanon and has been extensively involved in designing, managing and overseeing a number of other large scale surveys including the World Mental Health Surveys in Saudi Arabia. She is a collaborator in the World Mental Health initiative and a certified trainer for the Arabic and English Composite International Diagnostic Instrument (CIDI). Ms. Mneimneh has a Master’s degree in Public Health and in Survey Methodology and is a PhD candidate in the Survey Methodology Program at the University of Michigan. Her main operational interests include conducting surveys in areas affected by conflict and disasters, cross-cultural survey design and implementation, and international capacity building. Her substantive methodological interests include interview privacy, social desirability effects, and adaptive measurement design.
David L. Morgan is a Professor in the Institute on Aging at Portland State University, where he also holds appointments in the School of Community Health and in the Sociology Department. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1977. He specializes in focus groups and in research designs that combine qualitative and quantitative methods.
Colm O'Muircheartaigh is Professor in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and Vice President for Statistics and Methodology in the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. He was formerly at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he had been a member of the faculty of the Department of Statistics since 1971. He was the first director of The Methodology Institute, the LSE center for research and training in social science methodology. His research encompasses measurement errors in surveys, cognitive aspects of question wording, and latent variable models for nonresponse. He has served as a consultant to a wide range of public and commercial organizations, including the BBC World Service, AGB, British Household Panel Survey, and the U.S. Bureaus of Labor Statistics and the Census.
Mary Beth Ofstedal is an Associate Research Scientist in the Survey Research Center and Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. She is closely involved in instrument development, data collection and research for the Health and Retirement Study. Her research interests include transitions in physical and cognitive functioning in old-age, utilization of health and long-term care services, intergenerational relations and support, longitudinal survey design and analysis, and comparative research.
Lisa Pearce is a sociologist and demographer who primarily studies how religion shapes family formation, relationships, adolescent self-image, aspirations, and achievement. With ongoing research set in both the U.S. and Nepal, her current U.S. work focuses on how religious ideology, practice, and salience in youth relate to subsequent education-, career-, and family-related attitudes and behavior. In Nepal, she studies how religion is related to family formation and connections between population dynamics and environmental consumption. Pearce conducts research with a mix of survey and ethnographic methods. She is coauthor with William G. Axinn of Mixed Method Data Collection Strategies (Cambridge, 2006) and coauthor with Melinda Lundquist Denton of A Faith of Their Own: Stability and Change in the Religiosity of America’s Adolescents (Oxford, 2011).
Beth-Ellen Pennell is the Director of Survey Research Operations at the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Ms. Pennell has more than 30 years of experience in survey research operations. She also serves as the Director of the Data Collection Coordination Center for the World Mental Health Survey Initiative, a joint project of the World Health Organization, Harvard University and the University of Michigan. In this position, Ms. Pennell coordinates the technical support and oversees the implementation of the data collection activities for general population epidemiological studies in more than 30 countries. She also led the development of the Cross-cultural Survey Guidelines http://ccsg.isr.umich.edu and is one of the editors of Survey Methods in Multinational, Multiregional, and Multicultural Contexts.
Emilia Peytcheva, is a research survey methodologist with RTI International. She holds a PhD. in survey methodology from the University of Michigan. Peytcheva's research expertise includes measurement error-inducing factors in cross-cultural research and the interplay among survey errors and their combined effect on total survey error. Her interests include methods for minimizing measurement error induced by the survey questionnaire.
Trivellore E. Raghunathan is a Professor of Biostatistics and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. He also teaches in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He is an Associate Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health (CRECH). He is a faculty member at the Center of Social Epidemiology and Population Health (CSEPH). He is also affiliated with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard University in 1987. Before joining the University of Michigan in 1994, he was on the faculty in the Department of Biostatistics, at the University of Washington. He continues to be involved in several projects at the Cardiovascular Health Research Unit (CHRU) at the University of Washington. His research interests are in the analysis of incomplete data, multiple imputation, Bayesian methods, design and analysis of sample surveys, small area estimation, confidentiality and disclosure limitation, longitudinal data analysis and statistical methods for epidemiology.
Nancy Riley is Professor of Sociology in the Sociology/Anthropology Department at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in demography from Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses primarily on family, gender, and population in China, and in that and other work, she has collected and used both quantitative and qualitative data. She is currently involved in a project on Honolulu's Chinatown. Her latest book, with Krista Van Vleet, is Making Families Through Adoption (Sage 2011).
Nora Cate Schaeffer is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She received a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1984, where she held various positions at the National Opinion Research Center. She has over twenty-five years of experience in survey methodology and instrument design. She has taught instrument design regularly for the Summer Institute and the University of Michigan-University of Maryland Joint Program in Survey Methodology. Her research has been published in Journal of the American Statistical Association, Public Opinion Quarterly, Sociological Methods and Research, and Sociological Methodology. Recently, her research has focused on interaction in the interview, and she is a coeditor of Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the Survey Interview.
Norbert Schwarz is Professor of Psychology, Senior Research Professor in the Survey Research Center and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research, and Professor of Marketing at the University of Michigan Business School. He received a Ph.D. in psychology and sociology form the University of Mannheim in 1980 and formerly held affiliations with the University of Heidelberg and Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden, und Analysen (ZUMA) in Mannheim, Germany. Dr. Schwarz's interests focus on human cognition and communication, including their implications for survey methods. For more information and recent papers see his Web site.
Jay Teachman is a Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago where he specialized in demography and statistical methodology. His research focuses on the use of event history models to study the timing and sequencing of important life-course transitions such as marriage, divorce and childbearing.
Richard Valliant is a Research Professor at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. He is also a Research Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1983. He is currently an associate editor of Survey Methodology and the Journal of Official Statistics. His research interests include model-based sampling methods, replication variance estimation, and regression diagnostics for survey data.
Amiram D. Vinokur is a Research Professor at the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research and is an Associate Director of the Michigan Prevention Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1970. His research focuses on determinants and consequences of stress in the areas of health, work, and unemployment, and on the roles of social support and social undermining in coping processes. His work also includes the design and implementation of preventive interventions for unemployed persons and their evaluation using randomized field experiments, follow-up surveys, and benefit-cost analyses. In recent years he has been teaching courses and publishing papers that focus on analyses using structural equation modeling methods.
James Wagner completed a bachelor's degree in political science from Macalester College in 1987, and completed a master's degree in political science from the University of Michigan in 1992. He has over 15 years experience working on surveys. He received his PhD from the Program in Survey Methodology in 2008. He currently is Assistant Research Scientist in Survey Methodology at the Survey Research Center.
Eben A. Weitzman is the Chair of the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance and the Director of the Graduate Programs in Conflict Resolution at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston. He received his Ph.D. in social and organizational psychology in 1994 from Columbia University. His work focuses on research methodology and on conflict within and between groups, with emphases on organizational conflict, cross-cultural conflict, and intergroup relations. He served as Reviews Editor for the journal, Field Methods from 1999 to 2006, has worked as a database programmer, and has conducted extensive training in computer use. His recent publications include: "Using Computers in Qualitative Research" (in the 2nd edition of Denzin and Lincoln's Handbook of Qualitative Research)," Analyzing Qualitative Data with Computer Software," "Problem-solving and Decision-making in Conflict Resolution," and with the late Matthew B. Miles: "The State of Qualitative Analysis Software: What Do We Need?" and the book, Computer Programs for Qualitative Data Analysis (Sage, 1995).
Brady T. West is an Assistant Research Professor in the Survey Methodology Program, located within the Survey Research Center at ISR. He also serves an an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Statistical Consultation and Research (CSCAR) on the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus. He earned his PhD from the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology in 2011. Before that, he received an MA in Applied Statistics from the U-M Statistics Department in 2002, being recognized as an Outstanding First-year Applied Masters student, and a BS in Statistics with Highest Honors and Highest Distinction from the U-M Statistics Department in 2001. His current research interests include the implications of measurement error in auxiliary variables and survey paradata for survey estimation, survey nonresponse, interviewer variance, and multilevel regression models for clustered and longitudinal data. He is the lead author of a book comparing different statistical software packages in terms of their mixed-effects modeling procedures (Linear Mixed Models: A Practical Guide using Statistical Software, Chapman Hall/CRC Press, 2007), with a second edition currently being written, and he is a co-author of a second book entitled Applied Survey Data Analysis (with Steven Heeringa and Pat Berglund), which was published by Chapman Hall in April 2010. He lives in Dexter, MI with his wife Laura and his American Cocker Spaniel Bailey.
Paula Wishart is a highly skilled facilitator and career consultant with 23 years experience in workshop design, development and delivery. She has coached and mentored individuals in facilitation and job skills both in the private and public sectors. She is a Master Facilitator for the JOBS workshops, having trained job counselors and facilitators in Michigan, Maryland and California. She has her Bachelor's Degree in Economics for the University of Michigan and a Master's Degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs. Currently, she is an Integrative Learning Coordinator at the University of Michigan.
William H. Yeaton is an independent consultant on research methods and evaluation. Yeaton received his Ph.D. in psychology from Florida State University in 1979. He worked full-time for 12 years at the Institute for Social Research and taught for many years in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He has consulted with many disciplines and published over 30 scientific articles in a wide diversity of areas including childhood obesity, developmental education, the effectiveness of self-help groups, coronary artery bypass graft surgery, change in bankruptcy law, child abuse, occupational stress, and carotid endarterectomy. His academic interests include methodological issues in psychology, health, and evaluation research.