Page 87 - The Importance of Common Metrics for Advacing Social Science Theory and Research

The Importance of Common Metrics for Advancing Social Science Theory and Research: A Workshop Summary
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13034.html

FINAL COMMENTS 75

colleagues succeeded in adding three questions to the SIPP on this topic. He
believes it is time to try again to add more questions.
To move ahead, Matthew Snipp recognizes the need to decide what can
be and what should be standardized. Even if standardization is not possible,
harmonization might be, especially across time and space. He called for the
participation of another set of actors—representatives of statistical agen-
cies, the Association of Public Data Users, the Council of Professional As-
sociations on Federal Statistics, among others—who have a direct interest in
the production of federal statistics and are proactive in making their views
known. Bohrnstedt agreed that harmonization could be possible when
standardization is not. He noted, for example, that in the National Center
for Education Statistics, various measures of social class or social economic
status are used. He welcomed greater efforts by U.S. statistical agencies to
harmonize measures across agencies at a given point in time, so that dif-
ferent statistical agencies, or different units in the same statistical agency,
are not measuring the same construct or concept in vastly different ways.

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