Facilitating Innovation in the Federal Statistical System: Summary of a Workshop by National Research Council of the National Academies

Author:National Research Council of the National Academies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Math, Chemistry and Physics : Math and Statistics
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Published: 2011-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Difficulty of Resolving the Culture Differences

Dillman notes that government statistical agencies, such as the Census Bureau, are highly complex organizations with many different tasks.1 Not only are there several levels of hierarchy inside the organization, which makes identifying the originator of any material difficult, but also, and more importantly, there are several levels of hierarchy outside the statistical agency. He noted, for example, that the then-proposed 2000 research and development program of the Census Bureau might go through a minimum of eight entities outside the agency. Differences in organizational hierarchies may be resolved in a number of ways, such as by which entity is the most powerful or by who won the last time. As a result, compromises are common, and the decisions made by organizational hierarchies are often based on different issues from those that originally led to the negotiation. Dillman asserted that, in particular, measurement and nonresponse issues are decided in this kind of complex hierarchical process, and they “lose” to operations issues on one hand and statistical issues on the other. He notes (Dillman, 1996, p. 119):

1Although the focus of his article is on government statistical agencies and the Census Bureau in particular, Dillman noted the general nature of the issues. The solutions he presents are not unique to government survey organizations, he wrote, but also apply to universities and corporations.

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