Good Afternoon Everyone, I'd like to introduce myself and join this conversation. My name is Sam Dupre and I am the new Director of Strategic Analytics for APMA. In short, I am the person who will be managing and using this data within APMA and I want to put myself out into this conversation to hopefully address some of the concerns mentioned herein.
I'll keep this brief for now, but this is my
background. I am new to the podiatric world, but I have ~20 years of experience with quantitative analytics in everything from public health to demographics, and in data disclosure protection of sensitive data.
I'll be addressing individual posts in this chat, but I'd like to address a few common narratives that I am seeing here. These statements are my own.
1)
We need the lowest paying responses! There seems to be a perception from some that APMA wants to end up with a compensation number that is inaccurately high for ulterior motives. All I can do is promise that is not the case and make a plea to you all.
I hear the narratives about positions with extremely low salaries in comparison to the existing compensation statistics for the profession. WE NEED THAT DATA. Without responses from your colleagues who are in those positions, the data that we have to work with will never reflect those perspectives.
PLEASE convince any colleagues you know whom are in those lower paying roles to respond to the survey so that we can end up with results that truly reflect the profession.
2)
What is the point of this survey? The profession is changing.
Podiatrists have questioned the validity and representativeness of compensation figures which currently exist. People have asked us questions about on-call volume, changes in practice settings, and many other similar questions. These are critical points and very valid concerns.
Without data of this granularity, from a truly representative swathe of the profession, we will never be able to answer these questions. I'm not a podiatrist, I'm a data guy. I am fascinated by these questions and
I want to know which concerns from APMA's critics are backed by data so that we can support podiatrists with the information that they need and deserve. The existing data does not meet my standards and the standards of our team and so we NEED to fix that. THAT is why we are doing this survey, not from some desire to push any particular narrative.
3)
Why did we do [X] in designing the survey? (e.g., having 2 specific categories for type of podiatrist instead of broader choices or a single "podiatrist" class).
A lot comes down to response privacy. Feel free to check my
publication history, but I have worked extensively on data disclosure avoidance and respondent privacy. We recognize that there is a diversity in roles within the profession, but every disaggregation makes respondents less anonymous. This is incredibly important to Marit and I want you to be comfortable giving responses without being at risk of being identified. Between Marit's methods and APMA's, the privacy protection thresholds that are being applied to the data by Marit before the anonymized data is given to us are stronger than what the IRS and the US Census Bureau have historically used in many of their public data releases.
Many of these design choices were made to give us granularity where it is most important, at the cost of some less-critical areas, so that anonymity is preserved.
4) On that topic, I've seen some
worries about the geographic questions, with people worried that they would be identified. We have standards specifically to prevent that.
Marit and APMA have negotiated privacy mechanisms where respondent location will be abstracted and grouped with other respondents to a point where they are not identifiable before that data is passed to APMA.
APMA will never see figures for geographic areas that are small enough to not meet thresholds for anonymity. Instead, for example, people from Mansfield, Ohio might get grouped with those from Columbus to give aggregated numbers if there aren't enough distinct podiatrists there OR if those podiatrists are too different (and thus individually identifiable).
Thank you for your time and apologies for the long post. PLEASE respond to the survey and encourage your colleagues who feel that existing compensation figures don't match their reality to fill out the survey. Please feel free to send me a direct message if you have any questions, comments, or if there are entirely unrelated data questions that you have that you would like APMA to look into at some point.
Warm regards,
Sam
