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.
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