John Finamore, SRMS Publications Officer
The ASA Survey Research Methods Section (SRMS) will sponsor or cosponsor more than 50 sessions at the 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Miami Beach, Florida. These sessions include invited papers and panels, topic-contributed papers and panels, and contributed papers. In addition, SRMS is cosponsoring poster sessions. Paul Beatty, the 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 about topics covering the full survey cycle, from frame construction and sample design to disclosure avoidance and data dissemination. For a full listing of all SRMS-sponsored sessions, visit the 2011 JSM online program. Go to the “search by sponsor” dropdown menu and click on “Section on Survey Research Methods.”
For those attendees interested in learning more about sampling frames and sample design–related topics, SRMS-sponsored sessions will discuss address-based sampling (ABS), non-standard problems in national surveys, and the design of multi-mode surveys. If you are interested more in the operational side of surveys, you should consider attending the sessions on data collection operations in an ABS design, interviewers and survey management, and maximizing survey cooperation and minimizing respondent burden.
If your area of interest centers on the steps taken to derive the survey estimates, you will have many sessions competing for your attention, including those on imputation methods, small-area estimation, calibration weighting and benchmarking, and advances in estimation methodology.
If you are more interested in the process of disseminating survey data and survey estimates, the sessions on managing data confidentiality and disclosure avoidance for tabular data are ones you should try to attend.
Finally, if your preference is to attend sessions that cover a range of issues on one survey, there are multiple options for you, including a session on new developments in the American Community Survey (ACS), a session on a survey that uses the ACS as a sampling frame, and a session that provides results from the 2010 census nonresponse and group quarters field operations.
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