On Becoming a Bayesian: Early Correspondences between J Cornfield and LJ Savage

<p>Jerome Cornfield was arguably the leading proponent for the use of Bayesian methods in biostatistics during the 1960s. Prior to 1963, however, Cornfield had no publications in the area of Bayesian statistics. At a time when frequentist methods were the dominant influence on statistical practice, Cornfield went against the mainstream and embraced Bayes. The goal of this paper is (i) to explore how and why this transformation came about and (ii) to provide some sense as to who Cornfield was and the context in which he worked.</p

Two Talks by Samuel W. Greenhouse

The following two papers are written versions of talks given by my father, Samuel W. Greenhouse. The first paper in the series, entitled On Psychiatry, Epidemiology, and Statistics: A View from the 1950's and 60's, was presented in 1999 at the Harvard School of Public Health. The second paper, The Growth and Future of Biostatistics (A View from the 1980's) was the 1982 invited ENAR Presidential address delivered in San Antonio. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to include them as part of this special issue of Statistics in Medicine dedicated to him. Although these talks were not part of the NIH symposium on ``Perspectives on the Biostatistical Sciences: A Symposium in Memory of Samuel W. Greenhouse'' (June 11, 2001) it seems fitting that in the first NIH biostatistics symposium in which my father did not participate, he is still able to contribute to the proceedings. In the introduction that follows, I provide some background and context for these talks.</p

National Survey of Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW): A Comparison of Model and Design Based Analyses of Cognitive Stimulation Scores

Understanding and protecting vulnerable children is key to helping them become productive members of society. The Department of Health and Human Services sponsored the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) to better understand the lives of children who come into contact with the child welfare system. This paper uses the NSCAW data to investigate the role of maternal depression and maternal substance abuse on a child's cognitive stimulation scores for a subset of the children. An investigation of the survey methodology and the actual data led to some manipulation of the data and assumptions for the analysis. The differences between design and model based analyses of survey data were explored. The two analyses were applied to the cognitive stimulation scores. For the model based analysis, two models were developed, one which used the weights at each stage of model building and one which did not use the weights at each stage. The models had conflicting results. Two recommendations were made to improve upon the model based analysis. First was to obtain information about the weights after each stage of adjustment. The second was to model the different strata separately. The design based analysis (design based-model assisted) used the two models created in the model based analysis and re-examined them using design based techniques. The design based analysis had similar results to the model based analysis. The two models in the design based setting also provided conflicting results regarding the question of interest. To determine which is better, the question of which ``regression line'' provides better data reductive properties needs to be addressed.</p