I have served as the editor-in-chief for the survey methods side of @jssam.bsky.social for the last 4 years. We have had really great papers come through. To end my term, I want to highlight a few of them from the survey methods side of the journal in no particular order, other than the first paper.

The PRICSSA paper provides practical guidance to analysts who use complex survey data. This was our first Editor’s Choice paper. Read it and use it. Seidenberg, Moser,& West, 2023 Preferred Reporting Items for Complex Sample Survey Analysis (PRICSSA), JSSAM 11 (4), 743–757, doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

One paper in the Nov. 2024 issue is an empirical examination of “oversurveying” using linked data from the ACS, CPS, & 2020 Decennial Census by Jonathan Eggleston. Households sampled (not participated) for the ACS & CPS were less likely to participate in the 2020 Census. doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

All of the JSSAM special issues are great, but I am particularly pleased with the 2024 special issue on mixed-mode surveys, edited by Stephanie Coffey, Olga Maslovskaya, & @cameronmcphee.bsky.social. The papers in the special issue are all important contributions. academic.oup.com/jssam/issue/...

There are too many papers to highlight. So, instead I will point out the guest editors’ overview article that describes these contributions: Coffey, Maslovskaya, McPhee, 2024, Recent Innovations and Advances in Mixed-Mode Surveys, JSSAM, 12(3), 507–531. academic.oup.com/jssam/articl...

One of my favorite papers to think about during the review process was a paper comparing methods of translating q'naires by Dorothee Behr & Michael Braun. This paper had such a clever design - comparing back translation & team translation approaches from a source q'naire. doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

Experts then evaluated both translations and each translated qnaire was fielded in a web survey.This paper tells us about q'naire design more generally, along w/translation. Behr, Braun, 2023, How Does Back Translation Fare Against Team Translation? JSSAM, 11(2), 285–315, doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

Good survey methods papers don’t have to “work” to be publishable, and this paper using respondent-driven sampling to recruit sexual minority women is a good example. Deirdre Middleton and colleagues tried to use probability RDD sampling to find seeds for an RDS sample. doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

It failed, pretty miserably, and multiple times. How it failed is interesting and useful for recruiting rare/hard-to-find popns. Middleton, et al. 2022, Challenges of Virtual RDS for Recruitment of Sexual Minority Women for a Behavioral Health Study, JSSAM 10(2), 466–488, doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

Disclosure avoidance procedures are really important, and especially hard for qualitative research. The 2022 special issue on privacy and confidentiality (guest edited by Natalie Shlomo and Anne-Sophie Charest) tackled this question with a paper by Pascale, et al. academic.oup.com/jssam/issue/...

The paper describes how Census protects confidentiality in qualitative research. The approach is a good starting point for small n qual research. Pascale, Lineback, Bates, Beatty, 2022 Protecting the Identity of Participants in Qualitative Research, JSSAM, 10(3), 549–567, doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

Long ago and faraway (3 years ago???), it seemed like smartphones were a newfangled technology for collecting data. @floriankeusch.bsky.social & Fred Conrad’s research synthesis of what kinds of information can and should be collected using smartphones is a great article. doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

This easy-to-read research synthesis is good to assign in a research methods course, or to read when collecting data from sensors. Keusch, Conrad, Using Smartphones to Capture and Combine Self-Reports and Passively Measured Behavior in Social Research, JSSAM, 10(4), 863–885 doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

And finally, for a paper whose name I heard used to refer to this method in a meeting not long after the paper was published, Ipek Bilgen and colleagues examined different methods of showing visible incentives through envelopes when recruiting for the Amerispeak panel. doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

We used this paper when designing a recent experiment. The impact of methods papers is bigger than citations. Bilgen et al 2024 Peekaboo! The Effect of Different Visible Cash Display & Amount Options During Mail Contact When Recruiting to a Proby-Based Panel, 12(4), 872–892 doi.org/10.1093/jssa...

I could keep going - there are too many interesting and important papers that came out during my tenure as editor-in-chief for me to list them all. But the work was not mine alone. All of these papers improved through peer review. Thanks to our reviewers and Associate Editors for their comments!

The work was time consuming and hard and uncompensated (other than funds to pay for graduate student help with the social media accounts) – and sometimes involved dealing with unhappy authors. Despite these less-than-positive parts, I got to see the best stuff of our field before anyone else.