1. You’ve done many important surveys and studies over your career, from future housing needs to environmental justice. Which stand out?
My most rewarding survey work would have to be the homeless surveys. We started in 1990, and by 1992 we were recommending in writing that they should not hire us to do the survey again. It would be better to spend the money on developing a good Homeless Management Information System. After about three more surveys, they finally did that. It took many years and one major upgrade to get it right, but the system improved every year. Hawaii’s HMIS is one of the most valuable datasets in the state. Now another group of folks are disassembling it; I wish there was something we could do about that.
2. How has polling of voters changed? How will all-mail voting change how pollsters capture voters’ opinions?
That story hasn’t fully played out yet. We’re still struggling with the technology of polling — cleaning up the loose ends of successfully applying multimode surveys quickly and without blowing the budget. Now it will just be a notch more difficult because we have to know how the timing of elections affect the outcomes. That may actually take more time than skill because elections only come one every two years. The bigger problem may be the new populism with its polarization and antiscience attitude. If we cannot trust what we hear in interviews, then reliability will go down the drain. It hasn’t reached that level in Hawaii, and I hope it never does.
3. What kind of tourism-related surveying have you done that’s been most illuminating about/to Hawaii’s industry?
Tourism research has been bread-and-butter for all research companies in Hawaii. The state has some of the best visitor data in the world and I got lucky enough to be dropped into it very early. I think the whole HTA visitor data series is classic and it still works. The best pieces I have worked on were the development and growth of the Visitor Satisfaction surveys. VSAT has the greatest potential of any of the major datasets because it is large, repeated, and – despite the name — concerned about what people do, not what they like.
4. What kind(s) of polling would be most helpful as Hawaii works to recover from the coronavirus shutdown?
Reminds me of the research we did on the utility of the internet back in the early ’90s. It was a real challenge to gather data when we couldn’t even write the questions yet. The internet didn’t exist. We were studying something called “the information highway.” It was exciting and made you feel useful. I think the interesting part of the coronavirus research will be aimed not so much at “recovery” as on the changes that will grow out of coronavirus as a natural experiment — what we learned as we were forced to live a new way. That information can be taken into the future to make things work even better. That should be started now.
5. What’s surprised you most about your industry — be it technological advances, people’s habits/responses, or other aspect?
That it works at all. I mean, you’ve heard about the art and the science of survey research, but I sometimes think of the process as witchcraft. You follow the rules and ask a carefully selected sample of people what they do or what they are going to do. Then you apply their answers to the population as a whole and turn out real answers to important questions. Even now, I am constantly surprised by how well it works.
The other surprise is that we are all still here. … The business has survived massive economic catastrophe like 9/11. It has adapted to deal with the arrival of internet information gathering. It has survived plummeting response rates, the disappearance of landline telephones, and the demand for complex weighting systems. All those things spiked fear and changed the way we do things. But, every time the big changes occurred in business and society, the need for information — gathering it, assembling it, interpreting it — grew dramatically.
BONUS THOUGHT
Why are community polls and surveys important?
There have been many changes during my career in survey research. I cut my teeth on student and alumni surveys for the University of Hawaii. When I started in business, surveys were done almost exclusively for marketing purposes and commissioned by advertising agencies … that was in the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the mid-’80s we got into government studies based on surveys and large databases. We used to joke that those studies were evaluated by the pound and were shelf-warmers. … Then we expanded into program evaluation and EIS studies. In the course of a career, you pick up a large bag of tricks to apply to different kinds of projects. Program evaluation and EIS work take every trick you have. It isn’t like reporting how many people said “yes”; it’s about solving the problem.
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THE BIO FILE
>> Personal: Born 1943 in Akron, Ohio, second of 12 children; wife Barbara, son Michael
>> Education: Bachelor’s in history; master’s degrees in Asian history and in sociology; Ph.D. in sociology
>> Title: President, SMS Research & Marketing Services, Inc., 1978 to present.
>> Hobbies: Folk music, genealogy, cooking
>> A favorite quote: “We can find no social or moral justification, no justification, no justification whatsoever, for lack of housing.” — Pope Francis, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, 2015.
