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Abstract:
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I spent three decades working in survey research. After a hiatus of 15 years, in April 2018, I shredded reams of notebook paper covered with equations and stacks of articles. All went the compost pile on my organic farm. Eventually, they will come back inside the form of a flower. This January, I learned I won the Monroe Sirken Award. It came with money, but a paper was required. I was delighted, but at a loss as to what to write. A disk crash and the paper purge left me nothing to extend for one last contribution survey research. But it also opened an opportunity. I am an experienced traveler who can walk back into the landscape I lived in for decades and report on what seems to have changed, for better or for worse. Over the last decade and a half, I have wondered about the health of my former profession. Large segments of the population believe statistics is fake news. Google maps and address lists, make it easy to find people, but it seems increasingly difficult to engage with them. They hang up, refuse to answer the door, and throw away their mail unopened. Memories are on iPhones or computers. Folks may be so ignorant of the details of their lives that they cannot answer any question?
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