Budget

The 1970s witnessed a significant growth in the volume of SRL activities and an accompanying increase in staff. At the end of the decade, some organizational and financial problems occurred that came along with this growth.

By 1972, SRL's staff in full-time equivalents consisted of 58 people, 35.5 in Urbana and 22.5 in Chicago. The active interviewing staff numbered about 250 people. The budget for 1972­73 reached $620,000, a new high at that time.

Both the staff and budget grew sharply in the years that followed. By 1979, SRL's budget was $1,528,000, and in 1980, it reached $2,060,000. Project funds accounted for about 80% of this budget, with the rest coming from state funds. One of the major reasons for this growth was the increasing volume of health-related research generated from the Chicago office of SRL. A significant factor in this increase was the addition of Richard Warnecke as deputy director and head of the Chicago office in January 1974. Warnecke, who came from the State University of New York at Buffalo to the University of Illinois with tenure, was already a well-established medical sociologist with special interests in social epidemiology and medical technology diffusion.

Organizational Changes

The growth in volume in both offices, but especially in Chicago, led to the development of parallel facilities at both locations. One reason for the development of parallel staffs was the departure in 1975 of Mathew Hauck, who had been the field director of SRL since its inception.

Hauck, who went to Westat, a major national survey organization, was replaced by coheads- Michael Cox in Chicago and Jutta Thornberry in Urbana. There was some specialization in this period, with face-to-face interviewing mainly the responsibility of Cox and telephone interviewing under Thornberry's direction, but the key distinction was geographic. At the end of the decade, Cox moved to Urbana as a project coordinator, and Wendy Kreitman, a former project manager at NORC, became chief of Chicago's Field Operations.

A major shift had occurred in the methods that SRL used to collect data, with most work now being done on the telephone. Phone coverage in the state of Illinois and in the United States rose above 90%, and the cost savings of using telephone methods were substantial. While many commercial market researchers were already using telephone methods, SRL was one of the earliest heavy users of phone procedures among nonprofit survey organizations, and its procedures were used as a model by organizations who began phone interviewing later.

In parallel moves, Sudman stepped down as chief of the Sampling Section, and Johnny Blair and Ronald Czaja, who had been in the sampling offices of Urbana and Chicago, respectively, were appointed coheads. For data analysis, Dorothy Nemanich, who had headed Data Reduction, was named cohead in Urbana, and Robert Cabral, a newly appointed sociologist, was named as cohead in Chicago. Later Cabral was replaced by Andrew Montgomery.

There were two other staff changes at the end of the seventies. Margaret (Pegi) Greene, who had been with SRL for 14 years in increasingly responsible positions, resigned her position as manager of Survey Operations in Urbana to join her husband in St. Louis. Her position was filled by Linda Lannom. Roland Liebert, who had been the program director for sociology at NSF, was appointed associate director of the Urbana office.

In October 1978, the growth in projects and staff, as well as the Graduate School of Library Science's need for space in David Kinley Hall, finally resulted in a move of SRL in Urbana to two buildings at 1005 and 1007 West Nevada, about two blocks east of the main quadrangle. The advantage of the move was that sufficient space was available and the location was convenient to campus users. The buildings, which were converted houses, remained a bit shabby even after substantial remodeling and were not ideally suited for the moving of survey materials such as questionnaires between sections. Thousands of questionnaires had to be carried without an elevator to the third floor for packaging and then back to the first floor for mailing. Ultimately, however, the staff found the facilities cozy.

During this period, SRL continued to report to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the University level. This position was held successively by four administrators: Lyle Lanier, whose term ended in 1972, Barry Munitz from 1972 to 1976, Eldon Johnson from 1976 to 1977, and Peter Yankwich from 1977 to 1982. Ferber had cordial relations with all of them but was closest to Lanier, who had helped found SRL. Each new vice-president found SRL an unusual University organization, and a significant effort was required by all parties before the vice-presidents could understand SRL's complex budgeting processes. After some initial uncertainties, however, all these vice-presidents gave strong support to SRL's continuing activities.

The SRL Executive Committee continued to serve the important function of providing for a two-way flow of information between SRL and the campuses but relinquished responsibility for approval of SRL projects. This responsibility was given to an internal Project Review Committee, consisting of staff members on both campuses. The reality was that during this period, no projects from within the University or from state agencies were refused. The only projects that were turned down were commercial projects, and these primarily because clients demanded a level of proprietary ownership of data that was prohibited by University statutes.

As SRL grew, additional internal committees with elected and appointed members on both campuses were organized to advise the Director on administrative, personnel, and policy issues. An annual interoffice meeting was begun in 1977, at which almost all staff members from Chicago and Urbana met for workshops and seminars and to discuss mutual problems.

Major Projects

As SRL matured, the projects blended into research program areas. The major substantive programs involved health, economics, education, the status of women, immigration, agriculture, and recreation. There were also numerous studies done for public policy purposes, including studies of military housing needs and noise pollution conducted for the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, flooding, school desegregation, privacy, the Social Security claims process, and the housing and transportation needs of the disabled. The extensive program of methodological research that had begun continued to flourish with large projects related to the collection of health and economic data.

Health Studies

Cancer information studies were a continuing part of the health research activities of SRL during the

1970s. These studies were directed by Richard Warnecke, who also had an affiliation with the Illinois Cancer Council; they were funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The purpose of these studies was first to determine the current knowledge, beliefs, and behavior related to early detection and prevention of cancer of hard-to-reach populations. After this, a panel of respondents was given a series of communications related to cancer prevention, and changes were measured. The first study was of 1,600 Illinois residents over the age of 35, half urban and half rural, with incomes that put them in the lowest third of the population. They were contacted by telephone and covered for a five year period from 1977 to 1982.

The other very large cancer study was conducted for the National Center for Health Statistics between 1979 and 1981 and concerned the use of network sampling procedures to identify cancer patients. It thus combined methodological and substantive issues. Warnecke was the principal investigator, with Paul Levy of the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, Seymour Sudman, and Ronald Czaja as coinvestigators responsible for the methodological experiments. Network sampling involves the use of close relatives as informants on rare populations, such as cancer victims. Although its use reduces sampling variances, the key questions relate to the ability of network informants to provide data of sufficient accuracy. The study results indicated that close relatives outside a household were only slightly less accurate than those in the household, and thus the method was feasible.

Another feature of this study was the seeding of known cancer patients taken from cancer registries into a general population sample so that a records validation was possible. The use of such procedures raises difficult problems of confidentiality, but these were solved by having the sampling conducted by the person responsible for the cancer registry so that no one at SRL was ever aware of the identity of the cancer patients.

Among other health studies was one of the African American population of Chicago concerning sickle cell disease conducted in 1975 for Dr. I. D. Rotkin of the Sickle Cell Center. Personal interviews were conducted with three samples: 1,200 general household members, 223 community leaders, and 123 members of households in which one member had sickle cell disease.

Still other health projects involved a study of compliance and noncompliance with treatments for hypertension, conducted for Professor Jeffrey Salloway, at the time an Urbana medical sociologist; a study of kidney dialysis users conducted for the Kidney Foundation of Illinois; a statewide study of public knowledge of, attitudes toward, and use of emergency medical services conducted for the School of Medicine, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, in conjunction with the Illinois Department of Public Health; a study of holistic health center patients in Hinsdale and Woodridge, Illinois; a telephone survey of rural Champaign County residents to determine their health needs; a face-to-face interview study to determine whether there had been any effects on the health of persons living adjacent to a sewage treatment plant in a northern Chicago suburb; a mail and personal interview survey of residents in rural Illinois and other nearby states to study health utilization patterns and perceived need conducted for Frederick Kviz of the College of Nursing of the University of Illinois; and a telephone survey of residents of Champaign and Ford Counties in Illinois to measure the incidence and prevalence of mental health problems and what care was sought.

Economics

The economic survey program continued to be headed by Robert Ferber, but he was helped substantially by the addition of Barry Chiswick, a well-known economist who came to SRL and the Economics Department in Chicago in 1978 from the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

In addition to the panels of young married couples that continued throughout this period and were Ferber's major project, Ferber also was involved in analyzing data and preparing reports on income distribution in Latin America for the Estudios Conjuntos Sobre Integración Ecónomica Latinoamericana (Economic Development in Latin America) program and in developing approaches for more valid measurement of financial assets for the Office of Survey Development of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The latter work became part of the development of the Surveys of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) program now conducted by the Bureau of the Census. At various times, SRL prepared reports on pension equity, savings accounts, stocks and bonds, farmlands, and business assets. Alternative question forms for obtaining data on life insurance and durable goods were tested in the Chicago SMSA, as were alternative methods of imputation of missing data.

Chiswick's special interest was (and continues to be) the economic aspects of immigration. In a series of studies funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, he analyzed the earnings, employment, and labor force participation of the foreign born and their native-born children and estimated the impact of immigrants on the aggregate national income and on the distribution of income. The studies during this period involved secondary analysis of census and other data sets. Later, Chiswick also became a data collector in a study for the Department of Labor in which employers were interviewed regarding hiring practices, particularly those involving undocumented aliens.

Agriculture and Rural Development

Because of its location and the presence of the large College of Agriculture on its campus, the Urbana office of SRL has been heavily involved in studies of farmers and rural populations and of users of their products. During the seventies, there were about a dozen studies on a variety of topics, including rural planning; uses of fertilizer and pesticides and the danger to public health caused by chemicals (there were several studies of this issue); the production and disposition of wood residues by wood using manufacturers; farmers' attitudes on conservation and pollution; farmers' use of energy during the energy crisis; farmers' planting expectations and future plans; and a study of reasons why people move from urban to rural areas, reversing the usual flow.

Recreation Studies

There were several recreation studies dealing with leisure activities both within and outside of Illinois. These included studies of waterfowl hunters and the general public on bird conservation, a survey of horse owners and breeders, and eight mail studies of wilderness users of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota and the John Muir Wilderness Area in California, as well as local studies of the use of recreational facilities in Oak Park, in Champaign County, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

The Status of Women

Major studies related to the status of women were conducted for Helena Lopata of Loyola University in Chicago and for Joan Huber, Marianne Ferber, Bonny Birnbaum, and John Gottman in Urbana. The first of the two studies for Lopata involved a sample of 1,170 widows in the Chicago area to determine their sources of financial and social support. The second involved a sample of 1,000 women in the Chicago area to determine their changing commitments to work and family roles.

Huber studied male and female attitudes toward sex roles, comparing responses of husbands and wives in households with married couples. The study was funded by NSF, and data collection was conducted by telephone with a national sample of 2,000 adults under 65. Ferber and Birnbaum studied women's career patterns at the University of Illinois, obtaining work histories from a sample of 500 clerical employees. John Gottman, as part of a larger project on interactions between married couples, had SRL conduct 470 telephone interviews with wives of intact married couples to study satisfactions and dissatisfactions in their marriages.

Education

SRL was involved in more than 20 education studies during the seventies at all levels from elementary school through graduate education, with significant attention also put on vocational and adult education. Samples consisted of students, parents, alumni, dropouts, teachers, administrators, and potential employers. Several studies dealing with issues of school desegregation for local communities had significant policy impacts. Joe Spaeth continued his studies, based on analysis of NORC data, of the career attainment process of college graduates with grants from the American College Testing Program and the National Institute of Education.

Other Social Science Research

During this period, there were continuing Sociology practicums at both campuses with different topics each year, which are discussed in a later section. In addition, there were other projects of social science interest, such as a study for Professor Bok-Lim Kim of the School of Social Work in Urbana, who studied the social service needs of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino groups in Chicago. Finding interviewers who could speak the native languages proved to be challenging but possible.

Another study, conducted for Professor Marcus Felson of the Urbana Sociology Department, looked at the relation between lifestyle and criminal victimization. A study for the Center for Urban Affairs, Northwestern University, examined Chicago area residents' opinions about crime and the safety of their neighborhoods. Studies for

Professors Stephen Golant, Department of Geography, and John E. Poulin, School of Social Service Administration of the University of Chicago, looked at the needs and problems of persons over 60 and their social networks.

Professors James Kluegel and Eliot Smith of the Sociology Departments of the University of Illinois at Urbana and the University of California at Riverside, respectively, had SRL conduct a large national telephone survey of 1,500 households with oversamples of 300 high income respondents and 400 African Americans to study attitudes toward social stratification. The study asked respondents about their perceptions of social inequality, social mobility, and various plans for reducing social inequality. The project was funded by NSF and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Methodological Research

In addition to the health and economic studies already mentioned, SRL, primarily under Sudman's direction, continued an extensive program of methodological research funded by the National Center for Health Services Research and NSF. After completing work on expenditure diaries, Sudman and Ferber investigated the use of diaries for collecting health data. Alternative diary methods were tested, and results were compared with those from periodic telephone interviews. An interesting feature of this study was the sampling of members of one of the earliest HMOs, the Marshfield (Wisconsin) Clinic. This allowed the data collected to be checked against the clinic's records.

In conjunction with his colleague at NORC, Norman Bradburn, Sudman studied the effects of methods of administration on responses to threatening questions. Again, special samples were mixed with a general population sample so that records checks were possible on such sensitive topics as voting, declaring bankruptcy, and being arrested for drunken driving. As an interesting postscript to earlier SRL methodological research, Robert Pearl, who had been a client when assistant commissioner of data collection and survey operations for BLS, became an SRL researcher upon retirement from the Office of Management and Budget in 1974 and prepared a detailed evaluation of the results of the 1972­73 Consumer Expenditure Survey that had been conducted by the Bureau of the Census using methods tested at SRL. He continued to work on SRL projects into the eighties and was often referred to as SRL's "Washington Office."

Sociology Practicums

The Sociology practicums were conducted with SRL support in Urbana from 1971 to 1984. In Chicago, SRL participation in practicums ended in 1974. Topics included the political socialization of children, conspicuous consumption and consumption of energy-related goods and services, the use of halfway houses for drug offenders, firearms ownership, child rearing as related to housing, and sex role attitudes (this practicum led to the Huber study described under "The Status of Women," above).

Advising, Workshops, and Internships

During the seventies, advising activities reached a peak that was not matched later because of resource constraints. In 1972, almost 900 people received advice from SRL, about 600 in Urbana and 300 in Chicago. During the remainder of the decade, this dropped gradually to an annual advising load of between 500 and 600 persons.

SRL workshops continued to be popular, although workshops on data analysis gradually switched from SRL to the Computer Services Office (CSO). Earlier, SRL had been the chief supporter of social science data packages such as SPSS, while CSO put its main efforts into an in-house computer program (SOUPAC) that was very powerful but difficult for inexperienced users to understand. As the use of nationally available data packages became very widespread at most American universities, CSO also switched significant resources into support of these packages, and SRL focused its workshops on data collection. It should also be noted that CSO was used more often than previously for advice on data packages reducing, but this by no means eliminated the demand for such advice from SRL.

In the period from 1973 to 1976, SRL ran about a dozen workshops annually (on both campuses combined) that each attracted an average of 50 participants. The cost of the workshops and materials became significant, and in the later years of the decade, a small fee was charged for registration. By 1980, four workshops were being given annually.

A small but intense internship program for students obtaining an M.B.A. or M.S. in social science was begun in the seventies. Students received course credit for working at SRL. In the typical program, students would be rotated between sections to get a broad range of experience, although the actual work depended on the projects that were ongoing during the semester. At the end, the interns wrote a paper describing and evaluating the experience they received. Only one or two interns were enrolled at any one time. These interns were readily placed in research jobs when they graduated.

Survey Research Newsletter

The readership of Survey Research almost doubled from about 2,400 in 1972 to 4,400 in 1980. About 1,000 names on the mailing list were of faculty and staff of the University of Illinois. There was no doubt that Survey Research continued to be SRL's most effective method of communicating with both the University and the survey research community, as well as providing vital communications links among survey organizations.

Data Archive

The Social Science Data Archive at SRL flourished during the early seventies under the direction of Secil Tuncalp. A catalog of its holdings, published in 1976, listed 115 SRL studies, 11 studies from other organizations, and the available data from the 1970 census. The other archive at Urbana was the Social Science Quantitative Laboratory, which was established in 1974 and held political and poll data from ICPSR. As the decade drew to a close, SRL stopped archiving outside studies, and the archive became the SRL Data Archive. The archive would close in 1982, however, with the departure of the archivist and the lack of funds to maintain it.

Financial Problems

A reading of the history of SRL so far in this chapter or looking at the annual reports through 1978 would have given one a sense of growth and optimism, but financial difficulties became serious at the end of the decade. There were multiple reasons for these financial problems. Most important from the perspective of SRL's financial staff was the change in billing methods that occurred.

The change resulted from an objection by a federal auditor to SRL's methods of charging on federal grants and contracts. To that point in time, SRL had used an average billing rate for staff in various categories. This billing rate included time that staff spent in proposal preparation and professional activities that was not covered by state funds. Using this method, SRL had been able to balance its budget.

The federal auditor insisted and the University financial officers agreed that SRL could only bill on time that staff spent directly on a project, and that other activities would need to be covered from overhead and from state funds. SRL made the change and soon found itself significantly in the red. No new state funds were forthcoming, and the overhead was insufficient to cover the existing staff.

In retrospect, it is evident that neither SRL nor the University fully realized the consequences of the change in billing. The rapid growth of projects led to an overly optimistic forecast of what overhead return could be expected. Also, SRL had to share the overhead recovered with other University and campus units, and the share of overhead recovered by SRL was insufficient. Of course, one thing that could have been done was to cut staff, but this was not seriously considered in a time of rapid growth, although staff reduction was to become a major necessity in the eighties.

An aggravating factor during this time was the difficulty in obtaining accurate and current cost data. It was evident that the University accounting system was unable to provide the type of information SRL required to control project costs. A new internal cost control system was needed, but developing such a system was itself costly. The new system, once initiated, was never completely trouble free, and year end reconciliation with the University accounting system was always a problem.

Another one-time cost resulted from SRL's move in Urbana in 1978. Significant moving and renovation costs were required that had not been anticipated. A third factor that was later to become even more of a drain on resources was the decision to purchase two PDP 11/70 computers, one for each campus office. This decision was made based on forecasts of full utilization of the equipment, but this utilization never materialized. In the early days, the cost of installing the equipment and getting the software to operate was substantial.

An outsider might wonder if the cost problems faced by SRL were really caused by the system or were the results of poor management. For comparison, it might be noted that other survey organizations, both nonprofit and profit, have also had difficulty in controlling costs. A major problem has always been the highly variable workload, which makes it very difficult to staff at an optimum level.

Most survey organizations have handled this difficulty by placing staff members on short-term contracts and by putting aside reserve funds from busy periods to cover slower times. The University's fiscal and personnel regulations made both of these solutions difficult. Staff terminations required very substantial notification periods, and it was difficult to keep any reserve funds. At the least, it was certainly the case that being a part of the University of Illinois made fiscal control more difficult than it would have been in other settings.

The End of an Era

The end of the Ferber era of SRL came with shocking suddenness on September 8, 1981, when Robert Ferber died of complications resulting from surgery performed a few weeks earlier. Until late in the summer, Ferber had appeared to be in excellent health and was fully involved in SRL and his many other professional activities. Even after a routine checkup disclosed a tumor, there was every expectation that it had been found in time and that after surgery, he would return to all his activities. He continued to work on SRL matters in his hospital room until the very end.

Richard Warnecke, deputy director, was named as acting director and ultimately as the new director of SRL. The final chapter describes SRL during this last decade under Warnecke's leadership. Because Bob Ferber was such an important part of SRL, the next chapter of this history is devoted to a brief biography of Ferber and his professional and University contributions in addition to those he made to SRL.

Every organization owes a special debt of gratitude to its founder, who not only gives it birth, but shapes its growth. Founders of all successful organizations, and certainly of survey organizations, all share certain traits in common: intense energy, the drive to succeed, and the ability to lead and persuade. Every leader has special traits also. Robert Ferber had all the common leadership traits. His special traits were his very strong sense of humor and his pleasure in acting as a mentor for hundreds of graduate students and colleagues around the world.

Ferber was born of immigrant parents in New York City in 1922, went through the New York public schools, including the Bronx Science High School, and then to that great resource for poor but bright students, the City College of New York, where he received his B.S. degree in mathematics in 1942. Even then he was discovering a strong interest in and aptitude for statistics.

Ferber was not drafted during World War II because of his stuttering and so decided to continue graduate work. He selected economics because it used the mathematical and statistical skills he had begun to develop. At that point, Ferber made the decision to go to the University of Chicago, which had one of the most highly regarded programs. It was also a chance to get away from New York, which was not his favorite place.

While working on his M.A. degree, he held down several jobs that used his mathematical skills and gave him important statistical experience. One was as a research assistant at the prestigious Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, then housed at the University of Chicago. The other was as the part-time chief statistician of the Industrial Surveys Company, which was later to become the Market Research Corporation of America. There he was exposed to market research methodology, diary methods, and the uses of consumer expenditure data, all topics that were to be major research interests of his later in his career.

During this period, Ferber met Marianne Abeles, a fellow economics student at Chicago. They were married in 1946 and had a long and fulfilling marriage. The Ferbers had two children, Don and Ellen, of whom they were intensely proud.

After completing his course work and receiving his M.A. but not finishing the requirements for a Ph.D., he returned to New York City to work as an economist and statistician for de Vegh and Company, a Wall Street consulting firm. While in New York, he took courses in mathematical statistics at Columbia University and began his first book, Statistical Techniques in Marketing Research. This book, published in 1949, summarized major statistical advances that had occurred during World War II, including probability sampling and sequential analysis, and was received enthusiastically by both statisticians and market researchers. It gave Ferber a national reputation.

By 1948, Ferber, who had moved back to New York to be near his parents, made the firm decision that he didn't wish to stay in the New York area. He learned of an opening at the University of Illinois Bureau of Economic and Business Research, and he came to Urbana as a research assistant professor of economics.

Ferber retained his appointment at the Bureau for 33 years until his death. It was an ideal fit. Bureaus of business research, which were then found at most major state universities, conducted economic and marketing research projects for a wide range of clients, both profit and nonprofit. Ferber's collection of economic, statistical, and marketing research skills were exactly what such a bureau needed. The Bureau position gave him the chance to do exactly the kinds of research he enjoyed.

When Ferber completed his Ph.D. dissertation, A Study of Aggregate Consumption Functions, in 1951, he was made an associate professor and given tenure. He now considered himself to be both an economist and a marketing scholar. During the next decade at the Bureau, he wrote or edited with colleagues 4 marketing and marketing research books, 6 monographs, 4 book chapters, and more than 25 articles. He also became an associate editor of the Journal of Marketing and later of the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

He was named a full professor in the Bureau and in the Departments of Economics and Marketing in 1955. By this time, he had already achieved national prominence in statistics, marketing, and economics. He was also recognized on campus as a vigorous and effective researcher and had a wide network of campus friends.

Ferber's role in the formation of SRL has been discussed in chapter 1. It should be pointed out, however, that the energy he put into starting SRL and making it a functioning organization did not reduce his other writing and professional activities. Thus, while he was founding SRL, he also became the founding editor of a new journal for the American Marketing Association, the Journal of Marketing Research. In his five years as editor, he made the Journal of Marketing Research an intellectual and financial success that equaled or surpassed the Journal of Marketing.

Having discovered a real talent and pleasure in editing, Ferber was named applications editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1968 and in 1969 became coordinating editor as well, posts that he held until 1976. In 1977, when he ended his term as editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, he became the editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, which he had been instrumental in founding, and was still editor at the time of his death. As far as we know, no other editor has ever had the breadth of experience and judgment to edit three major research journals in three distinct disciplines.

During the 1960s and 1970s while he was running SRL and always editing a major journal, Ferber also found time to write or edit 12 new books (many with colleagues), more than 20 each of monographs and chapters in books, and some 45 articles, as well as book reviews and conference papers.

It is difficult to summarize this prodigious output briefly, but one can detect several major threads in Ferber's research. One involved understanding consumer savings and expenditure behavior. His panel of young households, supported by NSF and other funds, was followed over the years to see how husbands and wives made major buying plans. A second stream involved a wide range of methodological studies for measuring and reducing survey error, primarily on expenditures and investments. Near the end of his life, he had been studying methods for improving reporting of life insurance and other net worth components. There was a third thread involving a continuous interest in the operation and analysis of data from household consumer panels. His last work was on social experimentation and economic policy.

One might well wonder how he found the time to do everything he did. One strategy he used was to disappear for two hours each day to a carrel in the main University Library stacks, where he could not be found or interrupted. He always worked a full six-day week, but on Sundays he gardened. He swam daily during the lunch hour, using this time not only to strengthen his muscles, which had been weakened by polio, but also to discuss University business with his fellow swimmers.

He used every opportunity to write or edit. At a party, he might disappear for a time to work on a manuscript. He spent considerable time traveling by train between Urbana and Chicago on SRL business and always considered this prime editing and working time.

No discussion of Bob Ferber's professional life could omit his many services to professional societies. His cool, good judgment and wit made him a valuable member of any board on which he sat. He was elected president of the American Marketing Association in 1969­70 and served for six years as one of its representatives to the Census Advisory Committee. He was chair of the Committees on Publications of both the American Statistical Association and the American Economic Association. He served on the advisory committee of his friend George Katona's Economic Behavior Program at the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan.

Probably the work that he found most interesting was his consulting through the Brookings Institution for the consortium of Latin American governments and banks that collect data on consumer savings and expenditures. He made many trips to Latin America and had a great appreciation for its language and culture.

Although Ferber did no classroom teaching, he served on dissertation committees and acted as mentor for hundreds of graduate students and colleagues in a broad range of disciplines. Given his other responsibilities, students especially were always amazed that he would not only agree to review their work, but would return it with extensive, useful comments, usually within 48 hours.

Bob Ferber was honored in his lifetime with many prizes and awards, including the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for service to the field of marketing and the Hall of Fame in Distribution Award. After his sudden death in September 1981, his memory was honored at the University of Illinois with the Ferber Award, an annual dissertation award to an outstanding social science graduate student; an annual Ferber Lecture given by an outstanding survey statistician; and in the continuing operation of SRL, which he created and led.

This is the most difficult chapter to write since there is no cushion of time to lend a historical perspective. Looking back at SRL since Richard Warnecke was appointed director, there are two main themes that emerge. From a research and service perspective, SRL continued to be highly productive and highly regarded. Financially, however, SRL struggled with a large deficit that occurred during the transition from Ferber to Warnecke and continued through the entire period of the 1980s. This deficit and the reduced dollar volume of work in the early years of the Reagan presidency led to the painful need at times to cut the size of the SRL staff. During such periods, it is not surprising to find problems with staff morale.

Finances

The total annual budgets of SRL varied considerably between the 1982 and 1989 fiscal years but averaged about $2 million. The budgets varied from about $2.5 million in 1986­87 to $1.2 million in 1983­84. These very large swings were caused by delays in Office of Management and Budget approvals and in payments on some large federal projects and made planning extremely difficult.

It was impossible to adjust staff sizes rapidly because of University regulations, and this led to further deficits that could not be eliminated even in the years when volume was high. The computers that SRL had purchased assuming significantly greater use than in fact materialized were an additional cost burden.

By the end of the 1989 fiscal year, the accumulated deficit on the books for SRL was about $1 million, although there had been slight surpluses in several years during the decade that had chipped away at the deficit. By 1993, the deficit was paid off entirely using state allocations, and SRL is now on a sounder financial footing.

Organization and Staff

A continuing and painful reduction in the size of SRL's staff occurred during the eighties. The staff of 96 as of July, 1981, was reduced to 76 a year later, and by 1984, SRL had only half as many people as it had at the start of the decade.

A major concern of SRL and its new Director was to get a good sense of the finances of the organization, which proved not to be an easy task. David Shoemaker, who had been SRL's long-term accountant, left in 1982 to become an assistant to the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Urbana. He was replaced by Robert McDonald, who had earlier been treasurer of NORC, but McDonald also had troubles reconciling SRL and University accounts.

In 1985, Warnecke decided that all business operations of SRL should be centralized, and he selected Sharon Calkins, who was then the manager of operations for the Chicago office, to head the new business office. The position was upgraded in 1986 to assistant director for management and in 1991 to associate director. Calkins, who plans to retire in June 1994, still performs this role. After considerable time and effort, SRL now has an accounting system that provides timely monthly information on all activities and also ties back to the complex University fiscal system.

The figure on pages 37­40 shows the people who were at SRL during the time of upheaval. The splitting of section responsibilities between dual heads, one in Chicago and one in Urbana, proved too costly, and in 1982­83, the decision was made to consolidate the sections under a single head. Jutta Thornberry was made chief of Field Operations, a position she relinquished in 1986, when she resigned to join the Research Triangle Institute. In 1987, Thais Seldess, who had been with Market Facts, became chief of the Field Section. When she resigned in 1989, the position was taken by Karen Corrigan, who had been an SRL employee since 1983.

Sampling remained headed by Johnny Blair, who also became manager of the Urbana office in 1984, a position he held until his departure in 1989. The former Sampling cohead in Chicago, Cathy Keeley, left to join the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Andrew Montgomery was appointed chief of the Data Management Section but left in 1985 to join the University of Illinois College of Nursing, returning in 1993 as a senior project coordinator. Jeffrey Francik took over as acting chief of Data Reduction with other data management activities assigned to various other staff. This splitting of responsibilities did not work well, and in 1988, Richard Newel became chief of Data Management.

Each office continued to be headed by a manager. In Urbana, the managers during the decade were first Linda Lannom and, from 1984 to 1989, Johnny Blair. In Chicago, Sharon Calkins was manager of Survey Operations until her promotion, when she was replaced by Diane Binson. Binson left in 1987 and was replaced in 1989 by Gail Pyndus. When Blair left SRL late in 1989 to join the University of Maryland Survey Research Center, Pyndus was assigned overall responsibility for all operations, and Diane O'Rourke was made office manager in Urbana.

At the beginning of the decade, there were ten project coordinators, who managed the individual projects. In Urbana, these were Michael Cox, Matilda Frankel, Edward Lakner, Diane O'Rourke, and Linda Lannom; in Chicago, the coordinators were Elizabeth Eastman, Francis Fullam, Andrew Montgomery, Katherine Mallin, and John Vidmar. Of this group, only O'Rourke is still at SRL. Newer project coordinators included Ray Oldakowski and Tobey Fumento in Urbana and Karen Burke, Karen Corrigan, and Timothy Johnson in Chicago. Johnson and Corrigan are still with SRL.

Other changes in staffing are illustrated in the figure on pages 37­40.

The 1990s have seen slower staff changes. Ron Czaja left in 1990, and in 1991 Tim Johnson was promoted to assistant director to replace him. Mary Spaeth retired in 1992 and Joe Spaeth in 1993. Ed Lakner also left in 1993 to join the University of Illinois Library Research Center.

Several new project coordinators were hired in Chicago at the start of a new phase of the smoking project (described below under "Health Studies"), which NCI will fund for five more years.

Certainly, the eighties were not a growth period or even a very stable time for SRL or its staff. As SRL entered the 1990s, it had a considerably smaller staff than in the past. On a more upbeat note, it might be observed that SRL staff members who left, whether or not because of the cutbacks, were almost always snapped up by other survey organizations. The total field of survey research continues to expand, and the training and experience received at SRL is well regarded elsewhere. Also, the budget has stabilized in recent years because of a new arrangement under which funds may be carried over from year to year. This arrangement came as a tradeoff for reductions in state funds.

Projects

During the period from 1981 to 1989, there was a steady number of new projects each year, averaging a little more than 30. In no year did the number drop below 20 or rise as high as 40.

The major swings in revenue were not a function of the number of projects, but rather of their size and timing. Not surprisingly, the themes that had been established earlier continued to play an important role in SRL's research activities during the 1980s and into the 1990s, when the number of new projects dropped to about 10 a year.

Health Studies

The national funding of health related projects continued and actually grew during the eighties, while other research areas were being cut back. Given SRL's interest and expertise in health studies, these became the major focus of its research. Several large studies started in the late seventies were completed during this time. About half of all new projects in the past decade have been health related.

The largest new studies in the eighties were conducted for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and NCI. The Robert Wood Johnson national study of access to health care, conducted in 1986­87 under Seymour Sudman's direction in collaboration with Howard Freeman of the University of California at Los Angeles, was the largest study conducted to that time by SRL. The total completed sample was 10,130 cases. Since this exceeded the resources of SRL's combined interviewing staff in both Urbana and Chicago, about half of the fieldwork was done at the University of Wisconsin's Survey Research Laboratory in Madison.

The study was also noteworthy because the complex interviews were conducted by computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) and because network sampling methods that had been tested in an earlier SRL cancer study were again used successfully to identify individuals with special medical needs.

SRL had not been an early adopter of CATI methods which turned out, in retrospect, to have been fortunate. By the time SRL decided to develop its CATI facilities, the technology had shifted to powerful but inexpensive personal computers whose purchase did not require the significant outlay of resources required by earlier computers.

The major decision of what CATI software to use was made in favor of a system developed by Charles Palit of the University of Wisconsin. The study of access to health care required complex screening of respondents, and Palit and his wife made several trips to Urbana to train the staff and work out glitches.

The results of this study have been very widely publicized and have influenced such policy decision processes as, for example, the discussion about access to health care among the poor in Chicago and Cook County.

The NCI projects were evaluation studies to measure the impact of a televised smoking cessation program offered in the Chicago metropolitan area. The first study, in 1984­85, involved three waves of interviewing with approximately 1,100 persons who had registered for the American Lung Association's "Freedom From Smoking in 20 Days" program for comparison with other smokers who were not in this program but who were exposed to the televised quit-smoking intervention on WMAQ­Channel 5.

That study was followed by a larger study in 1986 that required screening of over 36,000 households to identify 2,400 with cigarette smokers and viewers of the WLS­Channel 7 evening news on television. Additional panels were also selected whose total membership was more than 6,500 telephone respondents and 300 face-to-face respondents living in public housing. This project was reviewed by NCI in 1988 and 1989 and again in 1992 and is still being funded. Some of the resources have been used to enhance SRL's ability to develop and test questionnaires using focus groups and cognitive laboratory methods.

The studies were a large-scale effort under the direction of Richard Warnecke with the collaboration of Brian Flay, then at the University of Southern California; Robin Mermelstein of Rush University; Leonard Jason of DePaul University;

Clara Manfredi of the Illinois Cancer Council; Thomas Cook of Northwestern University; and Kathleen Crittenden, Charles Gruder, Frederick Kviz, Loretta Lacey, and Patricia Langenberg of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The collaboration was so successful that Flay came to the University of Illinois and founded the Prevention Research Center. He was joined there by Professors Mermelstein and Manfredi. Warnecke was especially proud of this collaborative effort because he thought it typified the faculty linkage model for SRL that he was trying to achieve.

Several important studies explored methods for disseminating cancer care information to physicians. Ron Czaja and Clara Manfredi collaborated in 1985 on a study measuring the effectiveness of a computerized database that contained information on the latest treatment methods and the names of cancer researchers in a community. This small early project led to a much larger study, the evaluation of the Physician Data Query System. Another large and significant study funded by NCI was started in 1987 in collaboration with the University of North Carolina to evaluate community-based cancer treatment centers throughout the United States. This study, headed at SRL by Warnecke, included interviews with over 6,000 physicians and case abstracts describing the treatment of 9,600 patients. It will also have major health policy implications.

Other significant studies related to cancer included studies of factors related to cervical cancer in women in the general population and later in African American women, studies that were very successful although they required detailed reporting of sexual activity; patient compliance with referrals for cancer diagnosis; information-seeking behavior of cancer patients; and knowledge, beliefs, and actions of African American women related to cancer.

In addition to cancer studies, SRL became involved late in the decade with several studies related to knowledge and beliefs about AIDS as a part of AIDS prevention programs being conducted by the City of Chicago and State of Illinois for the Centers for Disease Control. Other significant health studies involved health care for women, provision of health and educational services for children in school settings, and the need for assistance of elderly patients discharged from hospitals.

Economics

Ferber's death reduced the level of SRL's activities in the arena of economics, but work continued, especially on the series of economic studies of legal and illegal immigrants and of their employers conducted by Barry Chiswick, who continued to be the nation's leading authority on this topic.

Another major project was conducted by Robert Pearl for the Internal Revenue Service. This project used diary data and interviews to measure tipping behavior of restaurant patrons. The results were used to establish new tax withholding procedures for food servers.

Joe Spaeth continued his research during the decade on work stratification combining sociological and economic theory. This work, funded by NSF, involved interviewing employees and supervisors up the hierarchical chain until the chief executive was reached. Spaeth collaborated in some of his work with Marianne Ferber in studies of gender-related employment practices. In addition, Spaeth collaborated with David Knoke of the University of Minnesota, Arne Kalleberg of the University of North Carolina, and Peter Marsden of Harvard University on a three year NSF-funded project called the National Organizations Study, which combined methodological and substantive issues related to the study of employers.

Policy Research

During the decade, SRL continued its commitment to policy research and conducted a large number of studies related to the environment, community issues, and schools. Several studies of parent satisfaction with school systems, including the Chicago public schools, were conducted. Studies of farm and rural practices to guide service providers continued to be conducted for the College of Agriculture. Studies were conducted in 1985, 1987, and 1989 for the Illinois Department of Conservation on the outdoor recreation activities of Illinois residents.

In 1982, SRL established the Illinois Poll, a statewide telephone omnibus survey. The first study had eight sponsors, half within the University and half from the state and nonprofit organizations. The 1983 poll had six sponsors, four from within the University and two outside. The next poll, in 1985, had five sponsors, four from within the University. Each of the polls had samples of between 800 and 1,100 respondents. After 1985, researchers' needs for specialized samples made it impossible to collect enough sponsors at any one time, and SRL has not conducted omnibus surveys in the past nine years.

Methodological Studies

Methodological research continued to flourish at SRL during the eighties and had a significant impact on many of the major substantive studies. Two major thrusts guided SRL's methodological studies in the eighties. One related to the sampling of rare and unusual populations and involved the use of network methods. The other involved efforts to understand survey responses using insights from cognitive psychology.

The network research was headed by Sudman, who worked with Johnny Blair, Ron Czaja, and Charles Cowan, who was then at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. In a study funded by NSF, Sudman and his colleagues compared alternative procedures of measuring the size of social networks in work, church, and social settings. A follow-up NSF grant allowed this research to continue with measurement of social network of friends and relatives. The ideas developed here were applied in the National Access to Health Study and Spaeth's study of work stratification described above, as well as to studies funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to estimate the incidence of missing children and by the National Institute of Justice to measure crime victimization.

Efforts in the cognitive area were shared by a number of researchers and visitors to SRL, including Norbert Schwarz from the Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (ZUMA, the German academic survey organization where Sudman spent a sabbatical in 1984 and began work with Schwarz) and Robert Wyer, a noted cognitive psychologist in the Psychology Department at Urbana. Wyer worked with James Kuklinski, a political scientist who joined SRL as assistant director in 1984, on a series of cognitive experiments related to political questions. In 1989 Sudman, Blair, Schwarz, and two doctoral students, Barbara Bickart and Geeta Menon, received NSF funding to study cognitive aspects of proxy reporting. This work still continues. Czaja and Blair also applied these ideas to their research on criminal victimization.

In 1991, Sudman became the principal investigator in a joint statistical agreement between the Bureau of the Census and the University to develop and evaluate reinterview methods and questionnaires. Face-to-face interviews were used to conduct cognitive experiments on reinterviews and think-alouds covering respondents' understanding of question meaning, their methods for giving self-reports, and issues of self-representation, such as question threat and embarrassment. The agreement concluded this past September.

Sudman is currently concluding a cognitive study for the National Center for Health Statistics that investigated methods for improving responses to health-related questions. Focus groups, think-alouds, and face-to-face interviews were conducted with women aged 50 and over who were members of the Rush-Anchor HMO in the Chicago area. Their responses on questions about having received cancer screening procedures were compared with HMO records to see whether recall procedures could be manipulated in questionnaire design.

A recently begun cognitive study is being conducted by Diane O'Rourke and Tim Johnson on minority populations' understanding of health questions. The Centers for Disease Control is funding the study, which will assess how racial/ ethnic background affects interpretation, information retrieval, judgment formation, and editing of responses to commonly asked health questions. Face-to-face think-aloud interviews will be conducted with 400 Chicago area residents of varying socioeconomic status and racial/ethnic background.

Service and Educational Activities

Early in the eighties, SRL performed data entry and other survey-related services for faculty and graduate students as time permitted. There were 270 such projects in 1981­82, but the increasing availability of personal computers made this data entry service unnecessary. SRL continued its ad-vising activities, but the budget crunch and cut in staff reduced the time available for advising from four free hours per project down to one. The number of faculty members, students, and others advised dropped from 500 in 1981­82 to 300 in 1982­83 to a little more than 200 per year from 1984 to 1986. Since 1987, the number of persons advised has been under 150 per year. The number of workshops offered also was reduced because of limited staff availability, and the Sociology practicum in Urbana to which SRL contributed ended in 1984 because of the reduced number of entering graduate students as well as cost constraints.

As part of the effort to build linkages with the faculty, alternative educational attempts were made. SRL brought in all-campus lecturers on both campuses to discuss significant develop-ments in the use of survey methods. The speakers included James A. Davis from Harvard; James S. Coleman from the University of Chicago; Philip E. Converse from the University of Michigan; Monroe Sirken from the National Center for Health Statistics; and Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, one of Germany's leading pollsters.

In addition to this, SRL instituted a series of noontime brown-bag lunch talks on both campuses with speakers from SRL, other researchers using innovative survey methods, and distinguished visitors.

Survey Research Newsletter

Survey Research, the newsletter that SRL had published since 1969, continued to be widely used, with a circulation of 4,500, but was faced with the same budget crunch that caused reductions in other SRL activities. Its publication was suspended for a year in 1984 but resumed in 1985, when funding was obtained from several major survey organizations, including the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the National Center for Health Statistics, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, NORC, Research Tri-angle Institute, the Rand Corporation, Westat, Mathematica Policy Research, and the Survey Research Centers at Michigan, Temple, and Mis-sissippi State Universities. Circulation was cut by about half. After Mary Spaeth's retirement, Diane O'Rourke and Marya Ryan took responsibility for the newsletter. Circulation has been cut again, shifting the emphasis from a wide cam-pus circulation to a more specialized national and international readership of those actively inter-ested in survey research.

The Faculty Linkage Model

After Ferber's death, Vice-President for Academic Affairs Peter Yankwich appointed a faculty committee chaired by Arthur Getis, head of the Urbana Geography Department. Its charge was to review SRL and to recommend whether it should remain a unit reporting to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs.

The committee produced a report that was highly favorable to SRL and recommended that SRL should remain an all-University unit and continue to report to the Vice-President for Academic Affairs. Committee members consid-ered a range of alternative models for SRL's continued operations and recommended that SRL adopt a model that was specifically designed to build stronger faculty linkages. The term "faculty linkage model" was used in the report and became SRL's guiding principle over the next decade.

The major way in which this model was im-plemented was to provide office space, staff support services, and some salary support for faculty members from a wide range of departments who were doing survey research or were in the process of preparing proposals to do such research. Those who participated were clear ben-eficiaries of this program.

Since geography played some role in reducing SRL interactions with faculty at the Chicago campus, SRL moved from its space in the Behavioral Science Building to Alumni Hall in 1981. Although this was only a move of about two blocks, Alumni Hall was on the north side of the Congress Expressway and not in the normal fac-ulty traffic pattern, so in the middle of the de-cade, SRL moved again to the Westgate Building on Van Buren Street, where it is located today.

During the eighties, permanent joint appoint-ments between SRL and other academic depart-ments were held in Chicago by Richard Warnecke in Sociology, Barry Chiswick in Economics, Ronald Czaja in Sociology, Frederick Kviz in Community Health Sciences, Paul Levy in Epi-demiology and Biometry, and Gerald Strom in Political Science. In Urbana, James Kuklinski in Political Science, Roland Liebert and Joe Spaeth in Sociology, and Seymour Sudman in Business Administration had permanent joint appoint-ments.

Also in Urbana, the following faculty members held visiting appointments at SRL:

Michael Birnbaum, Psychology
James Kluegel, Sociology
Catherine Ross, Sociology
Norbert Schwarz, Psychology
Sharon Shavitt, Advertising
William Trent, Educational Policy Studies
John van Es, Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology
D. Charles Whitney, Journalism
Robert Wyer, Psychology

In Chicago, Garth Taylor in Political Science and Richard Campbell in Sociology held visiting SRL appointments.

The major problem with the program of pro-viding faculty support was that only a very limited number of faculty members could be ac-commodated, so that while the linkages that existed were strong, the total number of linkages was small. Many faculty members felt excluded. In the nineties, SRL has dropped the number of faculty appointments. Since Joe Spaeth's retirement in the spring of 1993, only Warnecke and Sudman hold active faculty appointments with the Lab; Roland Liebert, Barry Chiswick, and Paul Levy continue to hold zero-time appointments.

Summing Up

The eighties for SRL were a decade of drastic and dramatic change to which SRL has adjusted in the 1990s. The context in which these changes occurred was national in scope, and the events that occurred at SRL occurred in some form at most other survey organizations. The fact that SRL experienced "roller coaster" effects of ex-treme ups and downs in project activity is a consequence of conducting large projects whose timing cannot be well predicted.

In this climate, it is no mean achievement for a survey organization to have reached its thirtieth anniversary. The total field is, after all, just a bit less than sixty years old. Given the difficulties that such organizations face, it is not surprising that some have fallen by the wayside. The total number of organizations in the field continues to rise, however, indicating the need in our complex society for survey organizations.

Mere survival, however, is not enough. What SRL and all organizations need to strive for is excellence in performing their missions. The past history of SRL demonstrates this striving for excellence. Some of this can be seen in the publi-cations that have resulted from SRL's activities. Another indication is the SRL alumni found in important positions in most large national survey organizations and at universities and colleges across the country. No one can predict the future for SRL, but there is every reason to hope that the future will be as bright as or brighter than its distinguished past.