Kari L. Carris is Associate
Director of the Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Criminal Justice Studies
department. In addition to her departmental administrative role, she also develops
and directs complex data collection and analysis projects for various federal
agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau
of Justice Statistics. She also has served as a member of NORC’s Institutional
Review Board.
Carris has more than a
decade of experience leading multidisciplinary teams in the design,
development, and delivery of complex data and analytic products used by policy
makers and researchers in the public health, criminal justice, and mental
health arenas. Her expertise spans a range of data collection methodologies and
modes, having directed large- and small-scale telephone, in-person, web, and
self-administered survey projects. From 2008-2012, she led NORC's innovative address-based
sampling, multimode data collection effort for the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention's Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health across the
U.S. (REACH U.S.) Risk Factor Survey. Under her direction, NORC completed more
than 25,000 interviews annually via telephone, mail, or in-person data
collection protocols with adults from various racial and ethnic groups across
the country to monitor progress and achievements of community-based
interventions designed to eliminate health disparities. Carris currently
directs methodological research projects for the National Immunization Survey
that are designed to improve response rates, address informational needs
related to childhood vaccination rates, and investigate the feasibility of emerging
sampling and data collection approaches.
Carris began her
career at NORC as Assistant Project Director for the Transition to Nicotine
Dependence in Adolescence, a multiphase, longitudinal project designed to study
prospectively why some adolescent smokers become nicotine-dependent while
others do not. Carris orchestrated the administration and processing of nearly
17,000 school-based, student questionnaires and simultaneously coordinated the
programming, administration, and processing of parent-child computer-assisted
personal interviews that included the collection of biomarkers. Her experience
also includes questionnaire design and multivariate data analyses for the 2006
California Problem Gambling Prevalence Survey, the largest problem gambling telephone
survey ever conducted in the United States.