The Backstory of Deff and Deft

• Activity Number: 511
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Daniel Kasprzyk*+ and Yonghe Michael Yang and Fritz Scheuren
• Companies: NORC at the University of Chicago and NORC at the University of Chicago and NORC at the University of Chicago
• Keywords: design effects

Abstract

In the 175th year of the ASA, we are entitled to be looking backwards as a way of looking forward. One way to do so is to consider recovering some of the survey research advances that are buried in the hardcopy ASA proceedings of the Social Statistics Section (SSS) before 1978, the year that the Survey Research Methods Section (SRMS) was born and the year it split from the SSS. All SRMS proceedings papers from 1978 onwards are already online. As a service to our profession, we are embarking on an effort to identify, scan, and put online a selection of survey research papers published in the SSS proceedings prior to 1978. This talk focuses on a particularly seminal SSS session in the 1968 meetings held in Pittsburg, PA, to illustrate the significance and possibilities of this project. That session featured many luminaries, famous then and some even more now. Notably, Leslie Kish talked about his coinage of design effects, or DEFFs, and John Tukey built on Kish's idea and coined the term DEFT, which is the square root of DEFF.