Joseph Waksberg

Joseph Waksberg (September 20, 1915 – January 10, 2006) was an American statistician. While at the United States Census Bureau and Westat, he developed methods for area sampling and telephone sampling and made contributions in many areas of surveys and censuses.

Early life Waksberg was born in Kielce, Poland in 1915 and came to the United States in 1921 when his family immigrated. He joined the Census Bureau as a clerk in 1940. While there, he received the Department of Commerce Meritorious Service Award in 1956 and The Gold Medal Award in 1968. While at the Census Bureau, he worked closely with Morris Hansen, one of survey sampling’s founders. Among the other clerks at the Census Bureau were Benjamin Tepping, Joseph Steinberg, Samuel Greenhouse, William N. Hurwitz, Margaret Gurney, and Marvin Schneiderman —all of whom became distinguished statisticians.

U.S. Census Bureau 1940–1973 Waksberg mainly worked on sample design issues, but his thinking was not limited to mathematical considerations. Depending on the application, he adapted methods to account for practicalities. In the early 1960s he and John Neter studied memory recall errors in a consumer survey of home repair costs. Although response errors in expenditure surveys were a known problem, it had not often been studied directly. Neter and Waksberg conducted an experiment sponsored by the United States Census Bureau to study the tendency of people to misreport the time period when expenditures occurred. Large expenditures, in particular, were often reported to have occurred nearer to the present than when they actually occurred, i.e., they were telescoped forward. Based on their findings, they were the first to propose bounded recall as a potential solution. In the second or later interview in a continuing survey the respondent is told the expenditures that had been reported in the previous interview then asked for the additional expenditures since then. The telescoping effect was later recognized in cognitive psychology as a common memory problem in the recall of past effects. Waksberg and Neter are credited with doing the original work on the concept of telescoping.

Faulty data used in designing a sample was another topic he studied. Coverage errors were recognized problems for censuses and surveys on which he also led research. With his colleagues, Waksberg helped introduce address-list sampling as a way of reducing the number of households inadvertently omitted by field listers.

Later years After 33 years of service, Waksberg retired from the Census Bureau and joined Westat, a statistical research firm in Rockville, Maryland. method of random digit dialing (Waksberg, 1978). This article has been cited in various statistical and social science journals nearly 2,000 times. In 1986, Kalton and Anderson noted that the method was especially useful for sampling rare populations. The MW method has been particularly useful in identifying persons to use as controls from the general population in case-control studies.

In the early 1970s unrestricted random sampling of telephone numbers in the United States was extremely inefficient for household sampling. The MW method treated the first eight digits in the sorted list of phone numbers as clusters (known as 100-banks), screened clusters by phoning a randomly selected number in a sample 100-bank and retaining a cluster only if the contacted number was residential. In a retained cluster additional 2-digit numbers were appended to the 8-digit cluster number and phoned to obtain the desired sample size.