I am at the 10th Health Survey Research Methods Conference in Peachtree, GA, which is just outside Atlanta. This is a very unique conference that has been held every two or three years since 1975. It is a gathering of government health survey researchers and people from the companies that do most of their data collection. It is invitation-only, typically has 80-90 attendees, and is organized around a series of plenary sessions. A condition of attendance is that you agree to show up for all of the sessions. We take all of our meals together and pretty much talk about surveys for three days. It is health survey camp! This is my third time doing this and I enjoy it immensely, although I'm not sure why they keep inviting me.
The conference kicked off Friday night with a double barreled keynote. Jack Fowler (UMass-Boston) gave us a nice summary of the origins of the basic conference concept and its evolution over three decades. (Proceedings from some of the previous conferences can be found here.) It was an often humorous first-person report, Jack having missed just one conference in the set of ten. He was followed by Ed Sondik from the National Center for Health Statistics who presented an interesting talk on anticipating the needs for data on the health of the US population. He reminded us that the basic mission of NCHS is to collect and publish the most comprehensive and accurate data possible on health and within that mission he believes that this is "the best of times." He's very high on the quality the data, on the government leadership to use it, and on the way in which technology can make everything easier. Despite the enthusiasm, he expressed a couple of concerns. One is that while we have been good at recognizing the importance of and measuring the ABCS of good health (aspirin, blood pressure control, cholesterol control, and smoking cessation) we have been a lot less successful influencing people's behavior. He noted studies showing the strong link between health-related behaviors and the social networks within which people live, but also noted that we may not be studying and understanding those networks as well as we should. Hence the second concern, that we may not be leveraging all that we could because we are sometimes a bit too pure about the methods we are willing to use. Although he never used the words "fit-for-purpose" there was a fair amount of informal discussion about it once the session moved to the bar.