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Biosketches 2007 

Robert F. Belli is Associate Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Survey Re­search and Methodology Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Adjunct Research Associate Professor of the Survey Research Center at the Uni­versity of Michigan. He is also North American Editor of Applied Cognitive Psychology. Belli’s published work includes research on autobiographical and eyewitness memory, and the social and cognitive demands of survey question­naires. His most recent interests include the application of principles from cog­nitive psychology–especially auto­bio­graphical memory and conversational processes–to reduce response errors in retrospective survey reports. He is a lea­ding expert on the use of event history calendar (EHC) interviewing methods, and he has begun to explore how ethnicity interacts with conversational processes that occur in EHC methods.

Ipek Bilgen is currently a doctoral student in Survey Research and Methodology program (SRAM) at University of Nebraska Lincoln (UNL). She received her bachelor’s degree in statistics from Hacettepe University (Ankara, Turkey) and her master’s degree in SRAM, UNL with a minor in Statistics. Currently, Ipek is working as a research assistant at the UNL-Gallup Research Center in Lincoln. Her current projects and interests include methodological problems in cross-cultural survey research, Event History Calendars (Verbal Behavior Coding) and Social Desirability, Faulty Memory, and Satisficing in Vote Over-Reporting from a Cross-National Perspective.

Annelies Blom came to ZUMA as a researcher at the European Center for Comparative Surveys in November 2005. She is a member of the ESS Central Co-ordination Team working on fieldwork monitoring. Previously, she worked at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) in London. Ms. Blom holds an MPhil in European Politics from Oxford University and a BA in Social Sciences from University College Utrecht. She is currently undertaking a PhD on non-response bias in cross-national surveys.

Laura Branden is a Senior Study Director at Westat in Rockville, Maryland with extensive experience managing various aspects of data collection for large computer-assisted in-person and telephone surveys. She is currently the associate project director for the National Home Health and Hospice Survey and the National Home Health Aide Survey. She directed the National Nursing Assistant Survey which was part of the National Nursing Home Survey. She also directed the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort Child Care Provider (CCP) CATI survey. Before joining Westat in 1990, she was the data archivist for the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY-79). Her research interests are in survey methodology.

Michael Braun is a Senior Methods Consultant at ZUMA and directs the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). He holds a habilitation from the University of Mannheim. Dr. Braun has specialised in cross-cultural survey methodology and analysis. He has played a major role in a number of ISSP questionnaire drafting groups (the multi-country groups responsible for designing and testing ISSP source questionnaires). He is involved in the ISSP methodology group dealing with intercultural comparability of the standard demography. His main research interest lies in the relation between question design, translation, and data analysis. In particular, he is concerned with the use of data-analytic methods to check the adequacy of translations. He also coordinates the national part of the EU-funded five-country study PIONEUR (Pioneers of Europe’s Integration from “Below”). His most recent publications cover different kinds of errors in comparative surveys. A monograph to appear soon will address problems of comparability that are caused by the interaction of cognitive and communicative processes on the side of respondents and societal structures. He has also published extensively on international comparative research in the fields of inequality, work orientations and the family.

Rachel Caspar is a Senior Survey Methodologist and Director of the Program for Research in Survey Methdology at RTI International. Prior to joining RTI International she received a M.A. in applied social research from the University of Michigan. and a B.A. in sociology from Oberlin College. Ms. Caspar specializes in designing questionnaires and developing data collection procedures for surveys of sensitive topics. Her research interests include methods for adapting complex material and concepts to be easily and consistently understood by survey participants of all ages, educational, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, as well as methods for testing questionnaires. Ms. Caspar regularly teaches courses in questionnaire design and cognitive laboratory testing methods, most recently through the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, the Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina, and the Summer Institute at the University of Michigan. She currently serves as the Education Officer for the Survey Methods Research Section of the American Statistical Association.

Tzu-Yun Chin is currently a doctoral candidate in the Quantitative, Qualitative and Psychometric Method program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She holds a master degree in survey research and methodology. Her research interests include equating, answer scale usage, and international survey and testing program.

Manuel de la Puente is an applied sociologist with over 20 years of professional experience conducting applied social research in the private sector and in the federal government. Currently he is Assistant Division Chief for Survey Methodology in the Statistical Research Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. In this capacity he leads a group of twenty five survey methodologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, and other social scientists dedicated to the study of nonsampling errors in surveys and to the improvement of data quality. Since 1989, Dr. de la Puente has held other positions at the U.S. Census Bureau including Chief of the Ethnic and Hispanic Statistics Branch in the Bureau’s Population Division. Prior to joining the U.S. Census Bureau, Dr. de la Puente held research positions at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). Dr. de la Puente began his federal service at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). His private sector experience includes research positions at The Urban Institute and the National Council of La Raza, both in Washington, D.C. Before coming to Washington, D.C., Dr. de la Puente taught for a brief time at Rutgers University. Dr. de la Puente holds a Ph.D. and an M.Phil. in sociology from Columbia University, an M.A. in sociology from Fordham University, and a B.A. in political science and sociology from St. Peters College in New Jersey.

Lauren Doerr is a Survey Director at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC). She has played a central role in developing and implementing interpretation and translation procedures for multilingual surveys at NORC, including the New Immigrant Survey and the Refugee Assistance Survey. She holds a B.A. in English-Spanish Comparative Literature and Anthropology from Haverford College, and a M.A. in Social Psychology from the University of Chicago.

Brad Edwards is a Westat Vice President and Associate Director with extensive experience in large-scale survey management and design. He is the project director for the National Home and Hospice Care Survey, (NHHCS) and its companion National Home Health Aides Survey (NHHAS), for the Centers for Disease Control and the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. These surveys collect data via CAPI and CATI, with samples of 1,500 agencies, 15,000 patients and discharges, and 4,000 aides. Mr. Edwards is also the corporate officer for the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and task leader for CAPI design revisions and Spanish translation on the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He leads two corporate efforts at Westat: (1) developing new approaches for training field interviewers, and (2) coordinating best practices and enhancing corporate infrastructure for using paradata in surveys. Research interests include usability of data collection software, the use of incentives in surveys, quality of survey data collected from language minority populations, and methods for including language minorities and other relatively rare groups in surveys.

Rory Fitzgerald has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys at City University since May 2004.  He is closely involved in the design, management and overall coordination of the ESS and is a member of its Central Co-ordinating Team.  Before that he was a Research Director at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), which he joined in 1999, having previously worked at Gallup specialising in political opinion polls.  He is a graduate with a first class honours degree from Cardiff University and a masters in European politics from Swansea University.  At NatCen he managed a number of large-scale social survey projects, most recently the Department for Work and Pensions ‘Family Resources Survey’ (FRS).  He has carried out a number of large-scale computer-assisted face-to-face and telephone surveys, conducted cognitive and exploratory research and analysed complex datasets.

Patricia Gallagher is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her work centers on survey methodology, with a particular focus on health-related research. She has been a long time contributor to the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS^® ) project. This work includes developing instruments and data collection protocols for gathering information from patients about their experiences. Cross cultural comparability is also a focus of her research as surveys in the US, including CAHPS, are now often fielded in multiple languages. Trish received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Eleanor Gerber is a Social Science Analyst at the US Census Bureau since 1992. Her research interests include coverage, privacy and confidentiality, race and ethnicity and ethnographic studies to support the decennial census. Prior to her work at the Census Bureau, she taught anthropology at George Mason University in Northern Virginia.

Patricia Goerman is a Sociologist working in the Statistical Research Division at the United States Census Bureau. Her current research focuses on the development and pre-testing of multilingual survey instruments with a focus on Spanish language materials. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Virginia in 2004. Her dissertation was a study of Latino immigrants settling in non-traditional areas in the Southeastern United States. Her past research has included in-depth interviews with large numbers of Hispanic immigrants. She holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Virginia and a B.A. in Spanish, English, and Latin American and Iberian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Peter Granda is Assistant Director for Collection Development at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) located at the University of Michigan. He also manages two of ICPSR’s topical archives, the International Archive of Education Data and the Health and Medical Care Archive.

He has a postgraduate degree in History (India) and spent several years of study in the southern part of the subcontinent. He now assists researchers who work with comparative data. Along with colleagues at the Zentralarchiv at Cologne, he established a partnership to process and distribute Eurobarometer surveys for secondary analyses.

Sue Ellen Hansen is Director of the Technical Systems Group in Survey Research Operations in the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan. She has extensive knowledge of computer-assisted interviewing systems and has worked closely with users of such systems. With colleagues at SRC, she has directed or worked on many technical initiatives focused on the development of large scale sample management systems, the usability of those systems, digitally recorded survey interviews, and web-based computer assisted survey instrument and data documentation. Her primary research interests are the design and evaluation of computer-assisted data collection systems, interviewer-respondent interaction in the computer assisted interview, interviewer training and performance evaluation, and questionnaire design for comparative research. She holds an M.A. in applied social research and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Janet Harkness is a cross-cultural survey methodologist with expertise in instrument design, adaptation, and implementation. She has a multi-disciplinary academic background and training – comparative medieval studies (M.A.); linguistics, cultural anthro­pology (Ph.D.); survey methods and cross-national survey research (ZUMA). She was appointed to the Donald and Shirley Clifton Chair in Survey Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005, and became Director of the Survey Research and Methodology Program at the UNL Gallup Research Center in 2006. She continues her long-standing affiliation with ZUMA, Mannheim, as Senior Scientist and as a member of the Central Co-ordinating Team of the European Social Survey (ESS) and heads the Translation Work Package for the ESS. She co-ordinates the International Workshop on Comparative Survey Design and Implementation, as well as the ISSP methods groups on Questionnaire Design and on Translation. She has published, presented, and taught on numerous aspects of cross-cultural survey research and communication.

Her Master’s Degree from Edinburgh University was in Comparative Medieval Studies; she received a doctorate in English, Linguistics, and Cultural Anthropology, from Freiburg University, Germany.

Timothy P. Johnson is director of the Survey Research Laboratory, Professor of Public Administration and Research Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research interests include survey methodology, including measurement error in cross-cultural surveys, nonresponse error, and health behaviors in vulnerable populations.

Yelena Kruse joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s SRAM program as a Masters student in August 2005. She attended State University of Land Use Planning in Russia, Moscow specializing in economics and land development from 1997 to 2001. Shortly before graduating she moved to the US. She received a BA in Business Administration from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2005.  She expects to complete her M.S. in Survey Research and Methodology in August 2007. Her cross-cultural research has focused in questionnaire interaction in interpreted interviews. She is currently working on two projects in this area. She is also working on interaction comparisons between Standardized and Event History Calendar interviews.

Peter Lynn is Professor of Survey Methodology at the University of Essex and was previously Director of the Survey Methods Centre at the National Centre for Social Research. Peter specialises in all aspects of quantitative data collection methodology and has published widely on topics including survey non-response, weighting, data collection mode effects, respondent incentives, advance letters, sample design and survey quality. His full CV is available at www.iser.essex.ac.uk.

Current research interests encompass measurement error, non-response error and sample design – especially in longitudinal contexts. Peter is editor-in-chief of the on-line journal ‘survey research methods’ and editor of the forthcoming book “Methodology of Longitudinal surveys”, to be published by Wiley.

Kristen Miller is a methodologist in the Question Design Research Lab at the National Center for Health Statistics. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include the impact of culture and social structure in question response and bridging qualitative and quantitative methodologies to improve question design.

Peter Ph. Mohler is Director of ZUMA and professor at Mannheim University and heads the European Centre for Comparative Surveys (ECCS at ZUMA). He is a member of the Central Coordinating Team of the Descartes Award winning European Social Survey. His major research interests are comparative survey methodology and computer-assisted text analysis. His most recent publications are on comparative research, value change, background demographics and survey documentation.

Yuling Pan is a Sociolinguist at the Statistical Research Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. She has conducted extensive research on language use in cross-cultural contexts, survey translation, use of interpreters in survey interviews, and pretesting of survey translation in multiple languages. Her current research interests include cross-cultural communication, discourse and con­versation analysis of cognitive interviews, survey translation, language proficiency assessment for bilingual field interviewers, and survey interview interpreting. She has co-authored the U.S. Census Bureau Translation Guidelines, and has authored and co-authored books and academic journal articles in the field of sociolinguistics. She holds an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Guangzhou University of Foreign Languages, China, and a Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.

Beth-Ellen Pennell is the Director of Survey Research Operations at the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Ms. Pennell 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 (WHO), Harvard University and the University of Michigan. In this role, Ms. Pennell coordinates the technical support and oversees the implementation of the data collection activities for these general population epidemiological studies that are been conducted or are underway in 29 countries, representing all WHO regions. She is also Director of the WHO Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) Training Center. Ms. Pennell received her Master´s Degree in Applied Social Research at the University of Michigan in 1997.

Emilia Peytcheva is a PhD candidate in the Survey Methodology Program at the University of Michigan. She received a MS in Survey Research and Methodology from the University of Nebraska and BS in Social Sciences from Concord University, WV. Through her work as a research assistant, Emilia has been involved in various projects such as a test of a mixed mode design for the Eurobarometer, application of multiplicity sampling for surveys of the cell-phone-only population in the US, investigation of the relationship between nonresponse rate and nonresponse error, etc. She has been a teaching assistant for the Survey Methodology class and the Questionnaire Design class at the Summer Institute, University of Michigan. Her main interest is factors inducing measurement error in cross-cultural surveys.

Martine Quaglia completed her diploma (DEA) in sociology a the University of Paris, Jussieu, in charge of data collection methodology within the Survey department of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies, and has been mainly working between 1995 and 2004 as a co-ordinator on Ined and Insee (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) surveys concerning difficult to reach populations such as homeless people and drug users. She has, more recently (2004, 2006) been involved in researches on Sub-Saharan Africa demographic evolutions conducted in Mali and Senegal. Adaptation of the survey design to the population studied being the main paradigm of the field work, she is therefore interested in questions related to refining the different levels of the survey and data collection process such as the use of qualitative methods within quantitative studies, questionnaire design, interviewers and interpreters training, sampling procedures, multi mode data collection, etc.

Nicole Schöbi (1966), lic phil. I (Psychology) 1988 Teacher diploma at the Ecole Normale of Neuchâtel. 1988-90 Basic courses and exams in mathematics at the Federal Technical School Zürich. 1998 License in psychology, specialization methodology, at the University of Zürich.

Between 1990-98 Diverse teaching activities for children and adults. Since 1999, in charge of the planning and organization of the surveys ISSP, ESS and MOSAiCH (continuation of Eurobarometer) in Switzerland at SIDOS (www.sidos.ch).

Research Interests: methodology questions (response rate and quality enhancement in surveys).

Evi Scholz is member of the ISSP work group at ZUMA’s European Centre for Comparative Surveys. She graduated in political sciences, received a doctorate in social sciences and was researcher in several international comparative projects (on European parliaments, European elections studies, Eurobarometer) of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and the Zentrum für Europäische Umfrageanalysen und Studien (ZEUS). She was in the team constructing the Mannheim Euro­baro­meter Trend File, a co-operation project of MZES, ZUMA, and the Central Archive in Cologne. Evi Scholz is co-author of several ISSP’s study monitoring reports, the methods reports on the German ISSP studies and is involved in ISSP’s demography methods work group. She is mainly interested in inter­national comparative research, especially in background variables.

Alisú Schoua-Glusberg is a cultural/linguistic anthropologist (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1985) who has worked in survey research since 1984. She uses qualitative techniques for improving questionnaire design, including focus groups, cognitive interviews and ethnographic interviews, specializing in the use of these techniques with Hispanics in the US. Dr. Schoua-Glusberg has pioneered new approaches to instrument translation, a topic on which she has written and presented widely, and is a member of the European Social Survey Translation Taskforce. She has been responsible for design and implementation of data collection strategies and procedures in technically and technologically sophisticated longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys, at NORC, Harvard University, Metro Chicago Information Center and Impaq International. She is General Partner at Research Support Services, a small consulting firm she founded in 1996.

Tom W. Smith is Director of the General Social Survey and of the Center for the Study of Society and Politics at the National Opinion Research Center/ University of Chicago and the US principal investigator for the International Social Survey Program. His research interests are survey methodology, societal trends, and comparative analysis. He is currently serving as the delegate of the World Association for Public Opinion Research to the International Organization on Standardization, chair of Standard Definitions Committee of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and on the Board of Directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Ineke A.L. Stoop is head of the department of Data Services and IT of the Social and Cultural Planning Office (SCP) of the Netherlands, a policy related research institute, and responsible for (public) procurement of data, data quality, data archiving, survey research methodology and statistical consultancy . She studied psychology at Leiden University and worked previously at the Department of Data Theory of Leiden University and at the Department of Socio-Cultural Statistics of Statistics Netherlands.

She is at present chair of the subcommittee of social statistics of the European Advisory Committee on Statistical Information in the Economic and Social spheres (CEIES), and member of the Central Co-ordinating Team of the European Social Surveyv and the International Statistical Institute (ISI). Her main research interests are survey quality, in particular nonresponse.

Wendy L. Thomas is the Director of the Data Access Core of the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota. Her primary research activity is focused on the development of international standards for documenting and preserving meta data for social science data files. She chairs the Structural Reform Group of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and sits on the Advisory Board of the Open Data Foundation. Her work in the MPC covers the preesrvation and documentation of historical census data and supporting materials for the IPUMS International projects. Her major publications focus on data documentation and the impact on data dissemination and preservation.

Mary Vardigan is Director of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) Alliance, a group that is developing an international XML standard for social science metadata. She also serves as an Assistant Director at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), with responsibility for ICPSR’s Collection Delivery Unit, which encompasses the areas of Metadata, Publications, Web Site Development, User Support, and Membership Development. She also holds the title of Archivist at the University of Michigan.

Ana Villar graduated in Psychology from the USC (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain), where she also got two graduate level degrees on Consumer Behavior and Social and Market Research, completing a thesis on the construction of a human values scale for market segmentation. While at this University, she served as data analyst, data entry supervisor and also bilingual interviewer for the Commercial Psychology Research Group. Instructional experience includes teaching as an assistant for Research Methods courses (USC) and teaching SPSS courses at the University of Salamanca. In August of 2004, Ana completed her MS in Quantitative Analysis in Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Brussels, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in the Survey Research and Methodology Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her current research interests and expertise focus on methodological problems in cross-cultural survey research and mental health cross-cultural surveys.

Joachim Wackerow is Information Systems Developer at the Center of Survey Research and Methodology (ZUMA) in Mannheim. Current projects: MISSY, an information system on the German Microcensus; Exanda, a web based analysis system (German Welfare Survey Online). He is involved in the development of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) version 3 (vice-chair of the structural reform group). Areas he has worked in include data management and analysis of large data collections such as the German Microcensus and the German Life History Study.

Yongwei Yang is a researcher at The Gallup Organization. Among his research interests is test development and validation, where he also has a strong interests in issues pertaining to measurement equivalence/invariance in multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-lingual contexts. His work at Gallup in this area has also led to presentations and publications on evaluating translation equivalence. Yongwei earned his master’s degree in educational psychology, with a specialization in quantitative and psychometric methods, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.