Re-Defining the Who,When, and Where of Mentoring for Professional Statisticians

Organizations tailor their mentoring strategies to accommodate internal resources and preferences, producing different approaches in academic, government, and corporate environments. Across these settings, three common barriers impede effective mentoring of statisticians: overspecialization, time constraints, and geographic dispersion. The authors share mentoring strategies that have emerged at their organization, Mathematica Policy Research, to overcome these obstacles. Practices include creating a methodology working group to unite researchers with diverse backgrounds, integrating mentoring into existing workflows, and harnessing modern technological infrastructure to facilitate virtual mentoring. Although these strategies emerged within a specific professional context, they suggest opportunities for statisticians to expand the channels through which mentorship can occur.     

Trust in American Government: Longitudinal Measurement Equivalence in the ANES, 1964–2008

For over 50 years (1958–2012) the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey has been measuring citizens’ evaluations of the trustworthiness of the “government in Washington”—an indicator that has been widely used to monitor the dynamics of political trust in the US over time. However, a critical assumption in using attitudinal constructs for longitudinal research is that the meaning-and-interpretation of such items should be comparable across groups of respondents at any one point in time and across samples over time. Using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis for ordered-categorical data, we test the measurement equivalence assumption with data collected by the ANES from 1964 to 2008. The results confirm that the ANES’ political trust scale has the same basic factorial structure over time. But for two key items, several threshold parameters were found to be different across time points, indicating that the meaning-and-interpretation of these questions, and especially the question about whether the government in Washington wastes money that people pay in taxes, varies significantly over time.