Skip to main content

Steven Pedlow

Pronouns: He/Him

Principal Statistician
With 25 years at NORC, Steven is an industry leader in area probability surveys and imputation.

Steven is a principal statistician in the Statistics & Data Science department. He is the lead statistician on NORC’s area probability in-person interviewing projects, including the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), General Social Survey (GSS) and the AmeriSpeak recruitment of new panelists. Steven also has wide expertise in imputation, sample weighting, and sample design.

Steven has designed or consulted on every implementation of hot-deck and multiple imputation at NORC in the past fifteen years. This includes major projects like the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, and multiple surveys under the National Immunization Survey (NIS) umbrella, as well as smaller projects that have used a simple hot-deck strategy. The NIS projects (the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs and the National Survey of Children’s Health) both used multiple imputation of poverty status with income ranges as well as income values (and missing values). Among his sample design work, Steven has designed the recruitment samples for NORC’s proprietary AmeriSpeak panel to use NORC’s 2010 National Sampling Frame and 2020 Master Sample. Lately, Steven has transitioned from simply QC’ing, fixing, and designing weights to teaching weighting, both internally at NORC and externally. He designed and has twice taught the first SDS/MQSS training class (Weighting at NORC) as well as teaching a half-day weighting course for CDC University and a two-day class for the Federal Reserve Board of Cleveland on weighting for the non-probability Small Business Credit Survey. Most recently, Steven has been improving the use of R-indicators to improve representativeness for the SCF and GSS.

Consulting work he started in graduate school has resulted in co-authorship for articles in Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Anesthesia and Analgesia, and Journal of Vocational Education Research. Steven has also presented many varied papers to the American Statistical Association and American Association of Public Opinion Research, including such topics as post-Katrina control totals in New Orleans, linear programming to balance automatic case assignments for field interviewers, variance estimation for ordered categories, the impact of clustering on effective sample sizes, interviewer intervention for data quality, Benford’s Law to detect falsified cases, sampling undercoverage, and multiple imputation. Steven has also served the American Statistical Association’s Survey Research Methods Section as Newsletter Editor, Treasurer, and Publications Officer.

Project Contributions

National Congregations Study

The first-ever high-quality survey of a nationally representative sample of congregations

Funder:

Lilly Endowment with additional support from the John Templeton Foundation and the Pew Research Center

Survey of Consumer Finances

The only fully representative source of data on the financial condition of U.S. households

Client:

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Surveys of Women

Tracking reproductive health access, contraceptive use, and abortion prevalence in nine states

Client:

Private foundation focused on education and health issues

Publications