Martha is a senior research methodologist in NORC’s Methodology & Quantitative Social Sciences department. She specializes in survey sample design, questionnaire development, fieldwork monitoring and implementation, quality control, and data weighting for web, mail, telephone, face-to-face, and mixed-mode surveys. She provides rigor in all stages of survey research with project work covering a breadth of topics including public opinion, religion, health, justice, and transportation. Her experimental work focuses on mode shifts and bridge studies, predicting response propensities and survey outcome dispositions of sampled respondents, increasing response rates for hard-to-reach populations, and developing tools to monitor data collection activity.

Martha serves in many roles across projects at NORC. On the Religious Landscape Study III (RLS III), she sits as a sampling expert for this large multi-mode survey which includes a bridge study as the project transitions from a dual-frame random digit dial telephone survey to an address-based sample push-to-web survey. She also provides feedback on the questionnaire, mail materials, and quality control procedures. For the Healthy Illinois pilot survey, she designs methodological experiments aimed to increase survey participation and improve sample composition. On a project with the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, she analyzes intercoder reliability for data entry of mail surveys. For the Bureau of Justice Statistics, she assists in the creation of sampling frames and directories for establishments related to marginalized populations.

Martha brings over ten years of experience in survey statistics and methodology. Prior to joining NORC, Martha conducted sampling and data weighting as a senior statistician at Abt Associates, and earlier in her career as a survey statistician at Westat, for a variety of government agencies including the EPA, CDC, and USAID. She served as an international research methodologist at the Pew Research Center where she was responsible for the sampling methodology and mode comparison studies for opinion surveys across more than 50 countries. She also sat as a statistician at the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development where she worked on the flagship publication Education at a Glance, researching federal regulations primary and secondary education regarding instruction time, teaching time, and teacher salaries.