I recently began work as a research psychologist by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in Washington, DC.  The BLS is an independent agency but is contained within the Department of Labor (DoL) and is one of several major statistical agencies in the federal government.  Their primary focus is in the area of labor economics.  You are likely familiar with their products whether you know it or not.  They are the people who release unemployment figures every month, a thankless job in a recession.  You are also probably familiar with the Occupational Outlook Handbook that guidance counselors and teachers in high school use to show you your options for careers.  It has information about average wages, competitiveness for positions, etc.  In addition to these products, BLS collects information about time people spend on different daily tasks (e.g., working, commuting, etc.), what people spend their money on, prices of goods, and much more.  Collecting all of this information is difficult and doing it in manner that makes it useful to the government, private businesses, and individual taxpayers is a major priority.  That’s where I come in.

As part of the Behavioral Science Research Center in the Office of Survey Methods Research, I serve as a survey research to various program offices within the Bureau of Labor Statistics, helping design surveys that collect useful information.  Most of the surveys administered by BLS are longstanding.  In the quest for reliable data across time, these surveys are constantly being improved upon.  So I also help develop improvements to existing surveys through basic research on various aspects of the survey process (e.g., how to keep people from refusing to respond to the survey, how to improve respondents’ comprehension of individual questions, improving the functionality of web surveys, etc.).  Finally, I have also been involved in website usability projects.  For these projects we bring in users of our website and ask the to perform a series of tasks to determine potential improvements to the functionality and navigability of the BLS website and it’s subpages.  The job seems like it will be the perfect mix of conducting and applying research.

The job has been going very well in a practical sense as well.  I work 6:30 - 3:00 on most days. I have a couple meetings a week, a couple classes a month, and a steady stream of small and large projects to keep me busy.  My colleagues are great, my boss is great, and I’ve had great interactions with the people that I support in the program offices.  I have had a number of independent survey improvement projects (e.g., evaluating whether people can accurately report the number of landline and cell phones they own) and I’m close to developing independent research projects.  I now feel like a full member of the team and I feel productive/helpful and that’s all I’ve ever wanted in a job.