Key Dates


Committees

Many thanks to our committee volunteers that come from the QUEST group!

Steering Committee

Amanda Wilmot Amanda Wilmot (Chair) is a senior study director in Instrument Design, Evaluation, and Analysis (IDEA) Services at Westat, with almost 30 years of professional experience in survey research. During her career, Amanda has managed large-scale government surveys covering a range of social policy issues and specialized in the development, testing, and evaluation of survey instruments. She has taught classes in questionnaire design, cognitive testing, and focus groups in Europe and at the Odum Institute of The University of North Carolina. Amanda has particular interest in and experience with cross-national data collection and instrument design and was responsible for the development of the European Health and Social Integration Survey questionnaire. She is a member of QUEST and chair of the organizing committee for QDET2.
Paul Beatty Paul Beatty is chief of the Center for Survey Measurement at the U.S. Census Bureau. In that capacity, he oversees interdisciplinary teams that conduct questionnaire evaluation and testing activities for the bureau and other statistical agencies, as well as research on the causes and consequences of measurement error on surveys. Prior to this, he worked for 21 years at the National Center for Health Statistics, initially as a behavioral scientist in the Office of Research and Methodology and later as chief of the Ambulatory and Hospital Care Statistics Branch, which conducted numerous national surveys on health care in the United States. His research interests and published works focus on questionnaire evaluation, the design of complex survey questions, and strategies for balancing the communicative and statistical requirements of survey measurement. He has contributed to the survey profession in a number of roles, most recently as 2013 chair of the American Association for Public Opinion Research Conference. He also serves on the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly and is an associate editor of the Journal of Official Statistics. Paul is also a member of QUEST. He earned an MA in applied social research and a PhD in sociology, both from the University of Michigan.
Debbie Collins Debbie Collins is head of questionnaire development and testing at NatCen Social Research in the United Kingdom and editor and co-author of the 2014 book Cognitive Interviewing Practice. An experienced survey researcher, Debbie has specialized over the past decade in survey methodology, questionnaire development, and testing. She co-founded NatCen's Questionnaire Development and Testing Hub in 2006 and has developed and tested questions and data-collection tools for a wide range of clients. Debbie's research interests include novel uses of cognitive interviewing, effective combinations of pretesting methods, and the design of web and mixed mode questionnaires. She is a member of QUEST and an associate editor of the journal Survey Research Methods.
Carol Cosenza Carol Cosenza is a project manager at the Center for Survey Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston and coordinates the center's cognitive testing and question evaluation work. She has been involved in all phases of the survey process-from question design to data coding and analysis. The recent focus of her methodological efforts has been comparing the ways survey questions can be evaluated and understanding what is learned from that testing. As a project manager, she has been responsible for coordinating more than 80 studies on a broad range of topics, including health-related surveys, quality-of-life surveys, surveys designed to measure and evaluate patient-physician shared decision making, and program evaluations. Carol has been a member of QUEST since 1999.
Lyn Kaye Lyn Kaye is currently on secondment to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, where she works with the Respondent Collection Methodology team as an Assistant Director. Previously, in her substantive role with Statistics New Zealand, she has been responsible for leading research in questionnaire design and survey methodology and providing technical advice on questionnaire development and evaluation. She has been an expert advisor on Statistics New Zealand's Enterprise Design Authority and has previously spent several years on secondment to the UK Office for National Statistics, as a Principal Methodologist involved in the development of the 2011 UK Census. During her career, she has worked on a diverse range of business and social surveys. She has a keen interest in qualitative methods for evaluating questionnaires and has taught courses in questionnaire design and cognitive testing in New Zealand, throughout the United Kingdom, and in other European countries. Lyn has published a number of papers on questionnaire design methodology and acted as a reviewer for several statistical journals. She is a member of QUEST, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and NZ Research Association.
Paul Kelly Paul Kelly is chief of the Questionnaire Design Resource Centre (QDRC) at Statistics Canada. The QDRC is the focal point of expertise at Statistics Canada for questionnaire design and evaluation and is heavily involved in the design of all new questionnaires used by Statistics Canada. It also evaluates all of the agency's questionnaires prior to their use for data collection. Paul has conducted hundreds of cognitive interviews and moderated hundreds of focus groups, all with the goal of improving data-collection procedures, including the evaluation of survey questionnaires. He provides training in the field of questionnaire design and evaluation to Statistics Canada employees and others working in the domain of federal government information collection. Paul has been a member of QUEST since 2001, serving on the organizing committee since 2005.
Jose-Luis Padilla Jose-Luis Padilla is an associate professor in the department of methodology of behavioral sciences at the University of Granada (Spain) and editor and co-author of the 2014 book Cognitive Interviewing Methodology. His research focuses on psychometrics, questionnaire development, validity, and cross-cultural research. He teaches graduate and master's courses on psychometrics, data analysis, test design, validity theory, test adaptation, and cognitive pretest methods. Jose-Luis is on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals such as the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, Psicothema, and Journal of Hearing Sciences. The Spanish National Statistic Institute commissioned him to pretest survey questionnaires of national and international surveys such as the Spanish Census 2011, European Interview Health Survey, European Module of Disability, Spanish Health Survey, and the Spanish Labor Survey. He is also a member of QUEST, serving on the organizing committee since 2010.
Gordon Willis Gordon Willis is a cognitive psychologist at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and previously worked at both the Research Triangle Institute and National Center for Health Statistics/U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He attended Oberlin College and Northwestern University. Gordon has written the books Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design (2005) and Analysis of the Cognitive Interview in Questionnaire Design (2015). He teaches questionnaire design and survey pretesting through short courses in cognitive interviewing at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology and Odum Institute of The University of North Carolina, as well as for the American Association for Public Opinion Research. His work involves the development of surveys in cancer and other health topics and focuses on questionnaire development, pretesting, and evaluation. His current research interests focus on sociocultural issues in self-report surveys, with an emphasis on the adaptation of empirical methods such as cognitive interviewing and behavior coding to the development of survey questions that exhibit cross-cultural comparability, on the development of best practices for survey translation into multiple languages, and the conduct of surveys of hard-to-survey populations. Gordon is also a member of QUEST.

Organizing Committee

Amanda Wilmot (Chair), Westat
Paul Beatty, U.S. Census Bureau
Debbie Collins, NatCen Social Research U.K.
Carol Cosenza, University of Massachusetts
Lyn Kaye, Statistics New Zealand
Paul Kelly, Statistics Canada
Jose-Luis Padilla, University of Granada, Spain
Gordon Willis, National Institutes of Health

Program Committee

Debbie Collins (Co-Chair), NatCen Social Research U.K.
Jennifer Crafts (Co-Chair), Westat
Scott Fricker, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Kari-Anne Lund, Statistics Norway
Kerry Levin, Westat
Kristen Miller, Centers for Disease Control
Joselyn Newsome, Westat
Martha Stapleton, Westat

Publications Committee

Paul Beatty (Chair), U.S. Census Bureau
Debbie Collins, NatCen social Research U.K.
Lyn Kaye, Statistics NZ
Amanda Wilmot, Westat
Jose-Luis Padilla, University of Granada, Spain
Gordon Willis, National Institutes of Health

Pre & Post Conference Sessions

Carol Cosenza (Chair), University of Massachusetts
Kristin Stettler, U.S. Census Bureau
Karen Blanke, Statistics Germany
Dag Gravem, Statistics Norway
Patricia Goerman, U.S. Census Bureau
Rachel Casper, RTI International

Events Committee

Carol Cosenza (Co-Chair), University of Massachusetts
Rachel Vis (Co-Chair), Statistics Netherlands
Jaki McCarthy, USDA National Agricultural Statistical Service
Gretchen McHenry, RTI International
Darby Steiger, Westat