AAAS Section on Statistics

The Politics of Data

Teresa A. Sullivan, Ph.D.

November 17 at 2:30 p.m.

"The federal data system comprises fundamental infrastructure for our advanced, complex society and economy.  Many regularly reported indicators, such as the unemployment rate and the infant mortality rate, are so important as to have political consequences.  For this reason, there is a constant temptation to tweak the data collection, the coding, the publication, and/or the interpretation of the data to be more favorable to the current administration.  Although this temptation affects administrations from both parties, the United States finds itself in an especially contested moment over data.  This webinar examines a few of the current challenges for the 2030 Census with their possible consequences.

"Teresa A. Sullivan, Ph.D., has worked for over fifty years with census data in her roles as a demographer, researcher, and college professor.  She wrote Census 2020: Understanding the Issues (Springer, 2020) and chaired the National Academies Panel on Assessing the 2020 Census. She is past Chair of the Census Advisory Committee on Population Statistics. She is emerita President of the University of Virginia and an emerita professor of UVA, where she taught a popular course on The Politics of Data.  Her webinar draws on materials from that course.  She resides in Austin, Texas."

Register for the event on Zoom