Overview

Ting Yan, PhD, is a Vice President and Associate Director in Statistics and Data Science. She has more than 20 years of experience conducting research on survey design and methods. Throughout her career, she has developed survey questions, tested and evaluated questionnaires using various techniques (e.g., cognitive interviewing, expert reviews, latent class analysis), conducted methodological experiments, developed survey protocols, and applied advanced modeling and data science approaches to inform and improve survey designs. Yan led survey redesign efforts for surveys sponsored by federal agencies such as BLS, CDC, and HHS. She also designed and led new surveys, pilots, and field tests for large ongoing surveys sponsored by CDC, NSF, NIDA, and FDA, among others.

Yan has published extensively in major journals and books on survey methodology and on topics including multimode survey design, mode and device effects, question evaluation and testing, writing sensitive questions, response burden, reliability of survey answers and data quality, and total survey error. Yan is also an adjunct Research Assistant Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, University of Maryland, and the Michigan Program in Survey and Data Science, University of Michigan. Her leadership services in the survey industry include editor-in-chief of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, executive committee member for the European Survey Research Association, and committee chair for the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

Education

• PhD, Survey Methodology, Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM), University of Maryland
• MA, Communication, University of Connecticut
• MA, Linguistics, Peking University, China
• BA, Scientific English, Harbin Institute of Technology, China