Special Section on Published Articles That Have Influenced Policy

Abstract

Gladys Palmer (1895–1967) wrote numerous highly cited books and papers on labor mobility and social statistics. She was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1931 to 1967 and was a consultant to the U.S. Office of Statistical Standards from 1940 to 1962. Her 1943 paper titled “Factors in the Variability of Response in Enumerative Studies” presented results from one of the earliest systematic studies of errors in responses to surveys. In this study, respondents in 2686 Philadelphia households were asked the same set of questions on two visits, where the second visit took place on average less than 9 days after the first visit. On each visit, responses were recorded for household members on marital status, age, employment status, and education. Palmer reported that even when the same person in the household was interviewed both times, more than 10 percent of the ages reported differed by at least a year. Marital status was more consistent, with only 1.7 percent discrepant results between visit 1 and 2, but more than 20 percent of persons had different reported education levels on the two visits. Palmer’s paper influenced the development of theory of nonsampling errors in surveys (see Deming, 1950, p. 37; Hansen et al., 1953, Chapter 2; Dalenius, 1962, p. 341). She showed that even a census will have errors in response, and she emphasized the importance of assessing the quality and reliability of survey measurements. This important contribution toward the theory of total survey error established that even quantities such as age, which you would expect to be the same for interviews that took place one week apart, could exhibit variability in survey responses.