John Finamore, SRMS Publications Officer

The SRMS annual business meeting will be held at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Boston, Massachusetts, at 6 p.m. on August 6 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in Room CC-157c. The meeting is open to everyone, but all SRMS members are encouraged to attend.

The meeting is shaping up to be an event you will not want to miss. For those of you who have attended past SRMS business meetings, you should expect the same jolly good time you have experienced in past years. For those first-time SRMS business meeting attendees, here are some topics you can expect to be included on the agenda:

• Introduction of current and incoming officers
• Update on current SRMS activities
• Announcement of student paper and student travel award winners
• Updates from SRMS officers, including the SRMS treasurer and education officer
• Overview of SRMS involvement at JSM 2014, including the sponsored sessions, roundtables, and Continuing Education courses
• Preliminary discussion of JSM 2015 plans
• Updates and requests for input from the Council of Sections representatives
• New business

Beverages and light refreshments will be provided. If you have any questions about the business meeting, contact SRMS Chair Phil Kott at pkott@rti.org.

JSM Sessions

SRMS is the main sponsor for nearly 40 sessions, including four invited sessions, 12 topic-contributed sessions, 20 contributed sessions, and two speed sessions. When you consider the sponsorship of all these sessions, it translates into one or two SRMS-sponsored sessions per time slot throughout the entire conference. Karol Krotki, SRMS program chair, has done a tremendous job coordinating a diverse set of sessions that should provide an enjoyable week for conference attendees.

The SRMS sponsored sessions, in their entirety, provide information on topics covering the full survey cycle, from sample design to variance estimation. For a full listing of all SRMS-sponsored sessions, visit the JSM 2014 online program. Go to the “search by sponsor” dropdown menu and click on “Survey Research Methods Section.”

For those attendees interested in learning more about contact strategies, SRMS will sponsor a session on modeling response to tailor contact strategies in censuses and surveys. If you are interested more in imputation methodology, you should consider attending the session on recent advances in multiple imputation. If your area of interest centers on survey paradata or adaptive design techniques, you will have a few sessions competing for your attention, including a session on using paradata to examine multiple error sources simultaneously and a session on using adaptive design strategies to improve business surveys. Whereas, if you are more interested in disclosure avoidance techniques, the session on disclosure, confidentiality, and privacy is one you should try to attend.

Finally, if you want to try something entirely new, you should attend a speed session that SRMS is sponsoring. Speed sessions consist of 20 oral presentations of approximately five minutes with a 10-minute break after the first set of 10 talks. These short oral presentations are followed by a poster session later the same day.