This award continues NSF support for the American Statistical Association's Federal Statistics Fellowship Program. The Fellows Program also is supported by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The overall objective of the program is to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary research efforts that will stimulate the development and advancement of methodology and social science research relevant to issues on which Federal statistical agencies seek to provide information. The program accomplishes this goal by bringing academic researchers into the supporting Federal statistical agencies to work with agency statisticians and social scientists on problems of mutual interest. Specific research topics will vary but are likely to include survey methodology (including questionnaire design, data collection, estimation, and analysis), social and demographic studies (including research on the decennial Census undercount, coverage analysis of demographic surveys, and special problems of collecting data on sensitive issues), and economic measurement and analysis (including micro level studies of industry sectors, measurement of labor force characteristics, and measurement of non-wage benefits).
In addition to basic research, the Fellows Program aims to achieve the following goals: provide academic scholars with the unique opportunity to have "hands-on" access to federal agency data; bring about an improvement of the quality of the data collected and disseminated by agencies; develop a research group of personnel for the future recruitment of statisticians and other research scientists to help fill government needs; stimulate methodological and substantive research in academia on the problems of collecting and analyzing data that provide the basic information for making decisions that can have significant effects on society; and increase the interaction and collaborative research and education among federal agencies and between federal agencies and academic institutions. The Fellows Program directly benefits both the researchers supported by the program and the participating Federal statistical agencies.
