Barbara Anderson Named Chair of US Census Scientific Advisory Committee
The US census Bureau Director John H. Thompson has named Barbara Anderson as chairwoman of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee. Anderson is a sociology and population studies professor at the University of Michigan. The former faculty member at Yale and Brown universities has published articles on effects of an interviewer’s race in surveys and on issues of data quality.
“A lot of the challenges that face the Census Bureau are common throughout the world,” Anderson said. “Having international experience in a comparative perspective is helpful in giving advice to my own government.”
Anderson heads the 21 members of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, who each serve three-year terms. The committee meets twice a year to address policy, research and technical issues relating to a full range of Census Bureau programs and activities, including communications, decennial, demographic, economic, field operations, geographic, information technology and statistics.
“One of the most interesting things about being here is to see the breadth of the different surveys and censuses that are conducted,” Andrew Samwick, one of the new advisory committee members said. “You begin to appreciate the very large operational effort that is behind the data.”
