I spent the weekend outside Atlanta at the Health Survey Research Methods Conference. This is an episodic (the last one was in 2003) invitation-only gathering of about 80 government health survey practitioners and academic survey methodologists. We were all pretty much locked in a hotel for three days with nothing but survey talk and fattening foods. The proceedings from the last conference can be found here http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/proceedings_hsrm2004.pdf . The proceedings from this one will be published in a few months but in the meantime the main highlights:
- There is burgeoning field of surveys around disasters, most recently Katrina and the World Trade Center attacks. Some of it is very short-term tactical: what’s going on, where are the needs the greatest, and what needs to be done to protect public health in the immediate aftermath? And some of it is long-term, especially looking at mental health impacts.
- More and more federal surveys are collecting biomarkers. This is everything from saliva and hair samples to vaginal swabs. There are, of course, lots of issues around logistics and respondent cooperation but it is fascinating stuff. The standing joke is that soon we won’t bother to interview people; we’ll just collect biomarkers and figure it all out back in the lab.
- I was a discussant in a session that focused on tradeoffs in survey design. The particular thing I latched onto there was the increasing focus on nonresponse bias as a better measure of survey quality than the traditional response rate. I need to do a separate post on the issue, but the current trends are toward the development of better measures of survey quality and survey error. Some very smart people are focused on this and I think the research over the next few years will be very interesting.
So it was a weekend well spent, although I’m not sure my wife would agree.