Judith Nell Petty is Vice President for Field Operations at NORC. She is responsible for the leadership and general management of the NORC Field Operations team, which includes eight Regional Managers, more than 100 Field Managers, and more than 1500 Field Interviewers. She has experience with a broad range of data collection activities and methods. Her expertise is in operations management.
Petty has been instrumental in expanding NORC's use of technology in field interviewing, including CAPI, CATI, CARI, TACASI, in-field scanners, WWAN, netbooks, and handhelds. She has helped apply these technologies to interviewing in a broad spectrum of environments including homes and institutions and to data collection processes including collection of biomarkers, energy measurements, and data abstraction.
While at NORC, Petty has worked with a broad variety of NORC field studies including both national and site-based projects, often with multiple national projects in the field concurrently. Examples include the National Survey of Early Care and Education, the Survey of Consumer Finances, the General Social Survey and the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. She also contributed to to site-based studies such as the National Children's Study, Making Connections, the Resident Relocation Study, and Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) survey.
Prior to joining NORC, Petty was a member of Senior Executive Service (SES) for 10 years for the U.S. Department of Commerce, serving as the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau's National Processing Center (NPC) with a peak staff of 6500 employees at the height of the 2000 Decennial Census.
While with the US Census Bureau, Petty took NPC from a largely paper-based approach to one that was state of the art. She also consulted with other governments on their census efforts: she traveled to Beijing and served as an advisor to China on their first Census of Agriculture, and also traveled to South Africa serving as an advisor on the processing and logistics of the second South Africa population and housing census.
Petty serves on the FEDCASIC Advisory Committee. She has received a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal and a U.S. Department of Commerce Silver Medal.