Susan Schechter joined NORC in late 2010 following more than 25 years in survey research with various federal agencies. She brings a wealth of experience and deep knowledge of large scale survey research and data policy, particularly in the federal arena. One of her main NORC projects is directing the field support contract for the National Children's Study. She directs NORC's assistance to more than 35 Study Centers and works closely with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to implement new protocols for informed consent and collection of data, environmental samples, and biospecimens.
Prior to her tenure at NORC, Schechter served as chief of the American Community Survey (ACS) Office at the U.S. Census Bureau. She managed all aspects of the ACS, which is the nation's largest federal household survey and is designed to estimate population and housing characteristics for all geographic areas down to the census tract and block group level. Schechter directed the multimode data collection (mail, computer-assisted telephone interviewing and computer-assisted personal interviewing) continuously throughout the year in every U.S. county and municipio in Puerto Rico. In addition, she directed implementation of many ACS research and evaluation projects to improve data quality and availability, such as testing response by Internet mode, research to improve response among language-isolated households, and adding new measures to the instrument.
Prior to her work at the Census Bureau, Schechter was a senior statistician at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for seven years. There she focused on the government-wide implementation of OMB's standards for data on race and ethnicity, served as the principal reviewer for all data collections conducted by a number of statistical agencies (including the Census Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics), and led the planning efforts for the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Before OMB, Schechter worked at the Office of Research and Methodology at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) where she managed and conducted cognitive research to design questionnaires and improve data collection methods. At NCHS, Schechter co-organized the second Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology Conference (CASM II) and commissioned papers that were published in Wiley's Cognitive and Survey Research, for which she served as an editor.
A well-respected presenter at many conferences, Schechter has also authored numerous papers about ways to reduce response error through improvements in survey and questionnaire design. Schechter served for many years on the OMB Federal Committee for Statistical Methodology and is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association.