Emily Geisen

In her role as Manager of the cognitive/usability laboratory at RTI, Emily specializes in designing and evaluating survey instruments to improve data quality and reduce respondent burden. At RTI, she has conducted hundreds of usability tests on a variety of projects from the Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates to the 2020 Census questionnaires. Emily also teaches a graduate course on Questionnaire Design at the University of North Carolina (UNC). She was the 2010 Conference Chair for the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research (SAPOR); Secretary of the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association, 2009–2011; and American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Membership and Chapter Relations Communications Sub-chair, 2016–1018. Emily developed and taught a short course, “Usability Testing for Survey Researchers,” at the 2011 annual SAPOR conference; 2016 AAPOR annual conference; 2016 International Conference on Questionnaire Design, Development, Evaluation, and Testing, and UNC’s Odum Institute. She also teaches the course “Introduction to Focus Groups” at the Odum Institute. Emily received her B.A. in Psychology and Statistics at Mount Holyoke College and, in 2004, her M.S. in Survey Methodology from the University of Michigan’s Program in Survey Methodology, where she was an Angus Campbell fellow. While attending the University of Michigan, she also worked at the Institute for Social Research. She is the co-author, with Jennifer Romano Bergstrom, of Usability Testing for Survey Research (Morgan Kaufmann, 2017).