Gordon Willis
Gordon Willis, PhD, is Cognitive Psychologist in the Office of the Associate
Director of the Applied Research Program. Prior to that he was Senior Research
Methodologist at Research Triangle Institute, and he also worked for over a
decade at the National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, to develop methods for
developing and testing survey questions.
Dr. Willis attended Oberlin College, and received a PhD in Cognitive
Psychology from Northwestern University. He now works mainly in the area of the
development and evaluation of surveys on cancer risk factors, and focuses on
questionnaire pretesting. He has produced the "Questionnaire Appraisal System"
for use in evaluating draft survey questions, and has written the book
"Cognitive Interviewing: A Tool for Improving Questionnaire Design." He also
co-teaches a graduate-level questionnaire design course at the Joint Program for
Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, and serves as Adjunct Faculty
at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). His
research interests have recently turned to cross-cultural issues in self-report
surveys and research studies, and in particular the development of best
practices for questionnaire translation, and the development of pretesting
techniques to evaluate the cross-cultural comparability of survey questions.
Dr. Willis also works in the area of human subjects protection in cancer
research, and has served as Chair of the NCI Special Studies Institutional
Review Board (IRB). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of
Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, and consults regularly on
matters pertaining to ethical issues in population-based research.
|