United States Department of Agriculture

WASHINGTON, September 29, 2016 – Programs as important as the U.S. Decennial Census and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) every-five-year-Census of Agriculture rely on gaining a full count of the population. Defining, finding and gaining responses from hard-to-survey populations is a challenge that Nancy Bates, Senior Researcher for Survey Methodology with the U.S. Census Bureau, will discuss in the 26th Annual Morris Hansen Lecture.

The lecture takes place on Tuesday, Nov. 29 from 3:30-5:30 p.m. at USDA’s Jefferson Auditorium, guest entrance between 12th and 14th Streets on Independence Avenue SW. It is free and open to the public but registration is required.

In her presentation, “Hard-to-Survey Populations and the U.S. Decennial Census,” Bates will profile historically hard-to-survey populations in the U.S. Decennial Census with an emphasis on methods for locating these populations. Her talk will look at challenges associated with these populations and describe the emergence of social marketing campaigns as a means to encourage survey participation. Brad Edwards, vice president of Westat and Linda Jacobsen, vice president, U.S. Programs, Population Reference Bureau will follow Bates with discussion about her presentation.

Bates co-chaired the International Conference on Surveying and Enumerating Hard-to-Count Populations and developed the audience segmentation for the 2010 Census social marketing campaign. More recently, Bates helped produce a new metric to locate hard-to-survey populations called the Low Response Score. Bates is a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), Associate Editor of the Journal of Official Statistics and past president of the Washington Statistical Society. She has served on the Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Board of the Government Statistics Section of the ASA and is a member of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology. She is a distinguished alumna of the University of Oklahoma College of Arts and Sciences.

The Morris Hansen Lecture series is one of many public education and outreach activities in which the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) participates each year. The lecture series was established by the Washington Statistical Society to honor Morris Hansen and his pioneering contributions to survey sampling and related statistical methods during his long and distinguished career at the U.S. Census Bureau. The event is sponsored by the Washington Statistical Society, the National Agricultural Statistics Service and Westat Inc.

Additional information is available on the NASS website.