Polly Phipps

Affiliation:
Statistician, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Educational Background:
PhD, Sociology, University of Michigan
Master’s, Sociology, Vanderbilt University
Bachelor’s, Sociology, University of Washington

About Polly
I grew up in Spokane, Washington. As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I worked at a research center that conducted surveys, providing me with an introduction to the field of survey methods and statistics.

Surveys and statistics were what I gravitated toward during graduate school at the University of Michigan, where I participated in the Detroit Area Study (DAS) survey practicum, an incredible training opportunity. As students, we designed and carried out a probability survey from beginning to end—research design, sampling, questionnaire construction, pretesting, interviewing, coding, error correction, and analysis. I was hooked and signed on as a DAS teaching assistant and, later, as the associate director. The training led to my career as a survey methodologist in the government.

I joined the federal government in the late 1980s. At that time, there was a push to hire social and behavioral scientists to improve survey questionnaires and interviewing procedures, which fit perfectly with my interests. While the major focus of this effort was federal household surveys, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) had many business surveys that produced critical economic data. I applied my training to business survey questionnaire design, data collection procedures, and data quality measurement. This included developing tools to evaluate quality at early and late stages of questionnaire development and putting into place a model for instrument design that incorporated qualitative and quantitative methods.

I feel a great sense of accomplishment to have taken a lead at BLS to improve establishment survey questionnaire design and data quality measurement.