In Memorial

IN MEMORIAL

Dr. Seymour Sudman

1928-2000

Last year, the marketing discipline bid a sad farewell to one of its most distinguished contributors, Seymour Sudman. Seymour had a profound and enduring impact on the fields of marketing, survey methodology, sociology and political science. He was the Walter H. Stellner Distinguished Professor of Marketing, and Deputy Director and Research Professor, Survey Research Laboratory, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Seymour was a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and received the American Association for Public Opinion Research Award for Distinguished Achievement. He authored or edited 20 books and over 200 articles and papers on survey methodology and marketing research. He pioneered the trend to apply cognitive methods to questionnaire design and wrote several highly influential books on the topic (e.g., Thinking about Answers: Application of Cognitive Processes to Survey Methodology, 1996). He also made important contributions in the areas of sampling and response errors and published books that remain classics to this day, such as Asking Questions (1982), Applied Sampling (1976) and Polls and Surveys (1988). In addition to twelve Journal of Marketing Research articles, Seymour was widely published in Science and several prestigious sociology, statistics, and medical journals. It is rare enough to make such a profound contribution to one domain, let alone to multiple ones. ACR wishes to acknowledge the impact that Seymour Sudman made on the marketing field, as well as the many people whose lives he touched as dissertation advisor, teacher and research mentor, editor and reviewer, co-author, friend and guide. He will be sorely missed.

Geeta Menon and Sharon Shavitt