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Title
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Room
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Memorial Session: Wray Jackson Smith
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H-Grand Ballroom A
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Date / Time
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Sponsor
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Type
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08/07/2001
2:00 PM
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3:50 PM
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Memorial Sessions, Section on Government Statistics*, Caucus for Women in Statistics
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Invited
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Organizer:
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Sameena Salvucci, Synectics for Management Decisions, Inc.
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Chair:
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Elizabeth Margosches, Environmental Protection Agency
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Discussant:
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Floor Discussion
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3:45 PM
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Description
This session honors Wray Jackson Smith for his contributions to the practice of statistics within the federal government and his service to the profession. Dr. Smith, who died unexpectedly in May 2000, was a Fellow of the ASA, a founding member of the Government Statistics Section, and a long-time supporter of the Women's Caucus. Dr. Smith is remembered best for his work in federal program evaluation and his role in coordinating or helping to launch several major surveys for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Energy. After retiring from the federal government in 1983, however, he maintained a very active role in federal statistics from the private sector. In the first paper, Bette Mahoney reviews some of Dr. Smith's contributions to the application of statistical research to social policy, including his participation in early evaluations of Vista, the Job Corps, and Day Care and his role in some of the major social surveys of the 1970s. In the second paper, Dhirendra Ghosh and Sameena Salvucci discuss the influence of Dr. Smith's 1980 doctoral dissertation on the later work of Smith and others on the optimum periodicity of repeated surveys. Ghosh and Salvucci extend the generality of this work. The third paper, by Nancy Kirkendall, outlines a planned collaboration between herself and Dr. Smith on a text discussing the use of time series methods in periodic surveys. The paper reviews applications to assessing survey costs, analyzing survey design information, and designing edit and imputation procedures. The final paper, by Thomas Jabine and John Czajka, considers the problems that attend the use of periodic sample surveys as a data source in formulas for allocating federal program funds. The paper draws on Dr. Smith's work in the late 1970s as chair of the subcommittee that produced Statistical Policy Working Paper 1 for the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. In the month before his death Dr. Smith revisited this topic with a background paper that he delivered to keynote a Workshop on Formulas for Allocating Program Funds. Jabine and Czajka explore alternative approaches to addressing these problems.
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