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Meet Robert Santos, US Census Bureau Director

1 October 2022 1,040 views No Comment

Robert Santos, US Census Bureau DirectorRobert Santos’s career spans more than 40 years in survey research, statistical design and analysis, and executive-level management. He previously served for 15 years as vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute and directed its Statistical Methods Group. He was executive vice president and partner of NuStats, a social science research firm in Austin, Texas.

Santos has held leadership positions in the nation’s top survey research organizations, including the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago as vice president of statistics and methodology and director of survey operations, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan as director of survey operations, and Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research as senior study director and sampling statistician.

Santos specializes in quantitative and qualitative research design, including program evaluation, needs assessment, survey methodology, and survey operations. He also has expertise in demographic and administrative data, decennial censuses, social policy research, and equity issues in research.

Santos served as the 2021 president of the American Statistical Association and is an ASA Fellow and recipient of the ASA Founder’s Award (2006). He was the 2014 president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and received the association’s Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement in 2021. Santos is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and served from 2017 to 2020 as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was a longtime member of the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly.

What about this position appealed to you?

Two aspects were very appealing. First was an opportunity to serve my country. I’ve always been attracted to positions whose principal role is serving others. That’s why leadership, consulting, and mentoring have always resonated with me.

Second was the opportunity to use my whole self to lead the US Census Bureau. I bring something different that transcends my 40-year career in statistics. I bring my life experience, culture as a Latino, and values, which include justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. (I’m a JEDI!)

Over the years, I’ve seen that when we encourage and consider diverse perspectives, it facilitates more informed, effective research questions, research design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of results, and communication of those results.

Describe the top 2–3 priorities you have for the US Census Bureau.

Above all, we are driven by our mission. That’s why we strive for excellence. We actively seek better ways to collect, produce, and curate data of even higher quality, relevance, and utility to meet the needs of our country. Our values include transparency, scientific integrity, independence, and objectivity.

My vision for the Census Bureau also includes embracing the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Actively seeking alternative views promotes informed decision-making, which in turn leads to better methods and higher data quality and utility. Career staff grow professionally when they integrate DEI principles into their everyday work and, as a consequence, everyone gets an opportunity to advance professionally.

I seek to lead by example, enabling staff to see firsthand how leveraging our values and principles in all we do can lead to increased scientific rigor, higher data quality, and a more rewarding professional experience—one that prioritizes helping others.

What do you see as your biggest challenge(s) for the Census Bureau?

We have seen decreasing participation rates in our surveys and censuses in some important segments of our society. I believe it’s the symptom of a deeper, fundamental challenge: building trust among those who are historically undercounted.

How do we bolster trust in segments among the historically undercounted? We need to rethink our enterprise. We must transform from a siloed set of units relying mostly on a data solicitation paradigm (e.g., survey data collection) to an integrated data-ingestion-and-curation enterprise (e.g., many sources of data supplemented with surveys and censuses). This new paradigm allows us to identify gaps in the existing data we have already compiled.

We can then focus on addressing those gaps, which means the following:

  • Attending to those we measure the least often and the least accurately
  • Tailoring and adapting methods and measures to be more culturally relevant
  • Conducting outreach to stakeholders, local governments, and underserved communities to understand their data needs and show how Census Bureau data helps their community in public health, economic development, education and housing, infrastructure, and so on. Outreach allows us to collect more relevant data with better quality and utility.

Rebuilding trust in the Census Bureau among the historically undercounted is not a new issue. It will take time and dedication to see positive results. It needs to be approached in a focused, caring way—one that is tailored to specific audiences.

What kind of support from the statistical community do you look for?

We seek honest, constructive, continuous feedback and need diverse perspectives. We need to think differently about what we do and how we do it. That is why our career staff have designed and adopted a bureau-wide transformation and modernization initiative.

We would welcome additional fresh ideas from researchers who are outside the federal statistical system.

We also could benefit from continuous stakeholder and partner engagement. Interestingly, our modernization efforts start with getting a better understanding of how stakeholders use our data—all stakeholders. That can help us create better data products that fit the needs of the federal government and our communities. So please, help us by sharing your feedback!

Prior to your tenure, what do you see as the biggest recent accomplishment of the bureau?

Prior to the 2020 Census, I would have said using an adaptive design approach to fully digitize field operations and more effectively assign enumerators. After I was sworn in, I had the benefit of seeing some of the operational metrics results. I was astonished that the Census Bureau obliterated my greatest fears and completed the job conducting a rigorous 2020 Census. The overall results were fit for their uses of apportionment and redistricting.

I did not realize how important it was to have a high-quality list of housing units. Because of that, if the enumerators determined a housing unit was occupied, the career staff found a way to get an enumeration—from self-response, to proxy response and high-quality administrative records, to (a small amount of) imputation.

I am proud of the career staff for their extraordinary efforts and skill in pulling this off. Their dedication and resilience during this tremendously volatile and stressful period were remarkable.

Learn about the Census Bureau’s transformation and modernization initiative.

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