Don Dillman
WSU Press: 2024
Don Dillman, raised on a farm in Iowa, wanted to be an agronomy specialist when he grew up. According to his 1959 Chariton High School yearbook, his aim was to help farmers renovate their fields to provide more nutritious feed for animals—like the cows he milked morning and night.
To that end, he earned a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Iowa State University and went to Poland for six months in 1963 as part of an immersive 4-H International Farm Youth Exchange. Instead of cementing his dedication to farming, it opened Dillman’s mind to other possibilities.
“Poland had taken me in new directions while making it obvious to me that I needed to learn more about people and the institutions that guided their lives and less about plants,” writes the late Washington State University Regents Professor of sociology and renowned survey methodologist in his memoir, published six months after his death at 82 in June 2024.
In the book, he describes how seemingly random circumstances led him from a “limited life” on his family’s 160-acre farm to becoming one of the world’s most recognized survey methodologists.
As part of the second generation of survey researchers, Dillman did work at WSU and with the US Census Bureau—designing data collection protocols and measurement devices—that changed how surveys are conducted. A pioneer in modern survey methods, he sought to improve participation rates as well as the quality of collected information.
“My career was not influenced by the convergence of influences on fulfilling a particular life goal. Rather it was making decisions that were contingent on unexpected influences that kept happening,” Dillman writes. “Chance encounters and connections resulted in going from one set of research and applications to another in unexpected ways throughout my career.”
Among his earliest memories: spending his fifth birthday in the polio ward. He also describes his early schooling and the daily routine of rural Iowa farm life in the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1964, he married his college sweetheart. In 1969, the couple moved to Pullman, where they raised a son and a daughter. Dillman worked at WSU for the next 55 years—minus a stint on the East Coast, redesigning and improving participation in the 2000 Decennial Census.
Other survey researchers will particularly enjoy the second half of the book, which shifts from a personal narrative of his formative years to a career description in a more academic tone. Dillman gets into the details of data collection—something he also addresses in another book he coauthored: Internet, Phone, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method.
“The satisfaction he got from his work was not in the discovery itself, but in seeing ideas put into practice by colleagues and professionals around the world,” his obituary notes. “Don strongly believed that the mission of a land-grant university like WSU is to share new knowledge through outreach to the community, a mission he lived his whole career.”