Life in the Field of Question Design: Part Ia
After losing my federal job overnight, three Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up at my door. Our conversation about Jesus, the Bible, and same sex marriage turned into an unexpected field test.
Hearing that my entire program was eliminated by Elon Musk’s DOGE team, I instinctively put on my running shoes only to be met by three Jehovah’s Witnesses standing at my front door. A tall, smartly dressed woman, well put together, presented as the leader. She was accompanied by a shorter, dowdier man who tried earnestly for my attention but just couldn’t hold it like the woman. The third was a much younger woman, maybe 18 years old, who stood watching, not saying a word. I wondered if maybe she wanted to be someplace other than my front yard. Their intention was to introduce me to the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Oh, I already know him,” I said. “I’m Episcopalian.”
“How nice,” the woman said, smiling. Though maintaining niceties, it was already clear the Jesus that I knew was not the same Jesus that she knew. I still went along with the conversation given partly because the timing felt darkly ironic and partly because I suddenly had nowhere else to be.
“Many people are worried about the direction we’re headed. Do you notice how unsettled everything seems today?”
“Oh yes,” I said, assuredly nodding. After all, my colleagues and I were unceremoniously terminated by the federal government without any kind of consideration.
“The wars. The disasters. So much travesty. So much confusion and lying,” she added. “What people believe to be good and pure is, in reality, evil.”
“Yes,” I agreed, thinking of Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, the multitude of floods and fires brought on by climate change, and my uncle and in-laws who see Donald J. Trump as our nation’s protector. What is “good” is really “evil”; what is “sane” is really “insane.” We’re living through an oddly surreal crisis of unshared truth, all the while people’s lives (including my own) are thrown into chaos and anxiety for what is to come.
It was October 2025. The leaves were turning just as the fiscal calendar turned, and government went into yet another shutdown. Democrats would withhold their votes on the spending bill unless Republicans addressed the expiring health care credits, which would make health care prohibitively costly for those receiving insurance through the ACA. Republicans wouldn’t oblige; the President refused to discuss. The Republican Speaker shut down the House and sent representatives home to their distraught districts. There was no negotiation. To up the ante on Democrats with the hope they’d cave, the Trump administration notified 4,000 federal workers, me included, that our jobs were cut.
“The world is getting darker, but the light of Jesus Christ is shining brighter. Are you ready for when He returns?” the woman asked. The shorter man’s head tilted for my response while the young woman continued to stand silently.
“I’m not sure,” I said, wondering how anyone would effectively know if they were ready for the end. If they did, maybe they were a little too full of themselves, which the older two appeared to be as far as I was concerned. I was still making sense of the scene, all the while trying to make sense of the sudden loss of my 25-year career. I was unexpectedly ripped away from my colleagues and my agency, the National Center for Health Statistics, that was my second home and family for many, many years. Still standing silently, the young woman seemed inside her own head, maybe questioning her own preparedness for Christ’s return, maybe wondering if she herself had the right credentials to be standing in my yard.
“If you’d like, we can talk about how to get help and renewed hope.”
“Oh wait,” I said, now checking myself, “do you believe in same-sex marriage? That’s really important.”
Of course I knew what their stance would be on that; I just wanted to hear them say it out loud. I seemed to be looking for an argument, and they were convenient targets. They came to me, after all, to my front door, with the attempt to save my sorry soul. The older woman hesitated for a second and replied, “That’s not our concern today. We’d like to talk to you about the bigger picture.”
“I’m afraid I need to know, yes or no, before I can go on. Do you support same-sex marriage? It’s just too important.”
“Really,” the woman emphasized, “we are talking about the return of Christ….”
“I just need to know: yes or no,” I insisted.
She’d seen this line of questioning before, pulled out her Bible, and began leafing through the pages to find the verse that would meet the moment.
As if on cue, the man stepped toward me while the woman focused solely on the book in her arm.
“We are only saying what the Bible is saying,” he asserted. “You believe in the Bible, right?
That’s all we’re saying.”
The woman continued to flip through the pages.
“For example,” he went on, “the Bible says ‘do not kill.’ It’s one of the Ten Commandments. Do you believe that killing is wrong?”
“Of course I do,” I said, unable to see what murder had to do with same-sex marriage.
The man reiterated, “We are only doing what the Bible tells us to do.”
The woman looked up as she found the passage and assertively proclaimed, “God took the rib from the man and made a woman.”
“Not Genesis,” I interrupted. “You seriously aren’t reciting Genesis to me.”
Without pause, a bit louder and more punctuated, she continued, “That is why a man will leave his father and his mother and he will stick to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
“See, we’re just following the Bible,” the man noted. “You do believe the Bible, right? You said you went to church.”
“To use Genesis as a rationale against same-sex marriage,” I responded, “strikes me as a lack in critical thinking skills. The Bible doesn’t say anything about same-sex marriage. However, there are stories that show genuine love between men and between women, like David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi.”
I continued, “The Bible also doesn’t say one word about abortion, which is a bit paradoxical given how much that single issue consumes Christian evangelicals. Did you ever think of that? Why would they care so deeply about something that is not even mentioned? Seems questionable. I think Jesus, according to the scripture, would insist that women be in charge of their own bodies.”
The older woman again started flipping through the pages of her Bible as the man nudged up his glasses as if to be seriously considering. The younger woman continued to stand saying absolutely nothing, making not one motion. What was she even doing here?
With that pause, and not like me to miss an opportunity for making a point, I continued.
“The Bible has multiple authors and was written across different time periods, in many circumstances to different audiences and for different purposes. The Old Testament laws were for the Israelites in the desert, not for people in Jesus’ time and not for us today. Hence, the New Testament.”
The man spoke up, “We just believe what’s in the Bible.”
I countered: “It’s just not possible to believe everything in the Bible. To have a coherent message, you have to pick and choose the verses.”
“First Corinthians!” the older woman announced. I didn’t think she was listening to a lick of what I was saying.
“This is from the New Testament!” Well, maybe she was listening a bit.
“‘Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.’”
“Wow,” I said, “That is a lot of people not getting into heaven.”
“Agreed!” the woman resounded.
“It’s all too much, with so many gray areas that invite loopholes for people who do real harm on earth and still think they’re getting into heaven,” I said, thinking of Trump, MAGA, and the evangelicals who praise them. “And none of this is teaching from Jesus. Can we just focus on what Jesus himself asked of us?”
“Absolutely! Yes, yes!” they said. It’s possible that even the silent young woman nodded with approval.
“Jesus said we could forget about all of those other rules if we simply followed the Golden Rule. You know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Yes! We were all happy to agree on the importance of the Golden Rule.
And then I said, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, “Don’t you worry that maybe you aren’t following the Golden Rule? I feel you’re judging me, and that’s just not nice. Jesus wouldn’t like that. And I don’t think he’d be too happy to have you reciting Genesis as a reason to disrespect a whole group of people that are causing you no harm.”
I don’t remember how they responded; I’d stopped listening. I was talking right over them, calm and unapologetically smarty‑pants.
“You may be worried about my soul, but it might be prudent for you to look at your own thinking. Aren’t you concerned that your interpretation of the Bible is wrong? There are many interpretations of the Bible. Why do you think your version is right?”
Again, I can’t remember how they responded. I continued because I was fed up with the uncontrolled, unscrupulous power of the Trump administration and because I saw these callers as religious zealots displaying their predictable pretentiousness. What is it with people who cannot see that their version of the world might not be right? That there may be multiple reasonable versions? Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that there are many ways of being and making sense of things in the world? How is it possible for some people to be so sure of themselves in their judgment of others?
“You should read other people’s interpretation of the Bible,” I said, “so you can at least see that there are many different ways that people make sense of it.”
With this, I looked squarely into the young woman’s eyes and said, “If you understand that your view is just one of many, a light bulb might just go off in your head and say, ‘Oh wow, I didn’t realize that I had such a narrow understanding. Then you might say, oh maybe my interpretation is wrong, and maybe I’m the one destined to some other hell.’”
With that, the young woman’s eyes grew large, and the older woman said to her colleagues, “we’re done here. Let’s go.” To me, she said with an entirely affected perkiness, “Have a nice day!”
I relished in the fact that they were the ones to walk away. I out-talked the Jehova Witnesses. I won. Sort of. I can’t help feeling that my desire to interact was out of dysfunctional, emotional reasoning. They were there to argue, in my face, at my front door. How dare they try to tempt me toward their narrow-minded thinking, a narrow-mindedness that instills fear and then, by logic, hatred of a whole slew of marginalized groups of humanity.
I was fed up. And fed up for good reason. In a blink of an eye, the wretched little Trump MAGA trolls dissolved the program that I spent an entire career building. It was a little program. The average person wouldn’t know that it existed or what we did. But it was amazing. I once told the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services that we were the NASA of question design. And we were. We were the Collaborating Center for Question Design Research at the National Center for Health Statistics.
Our program was founded on the understanding that people interpret and handle information in different ways, shaped by the contexts of their lives. Someone living in rural Mississippi is bound to understand things differently from someone in New York City or suburban Ohio, for that matter. If we want to collect high-quality health information, we have to understand how all U.S. residents interpret our survey questions—the very questions that generate the data we depend on.
In doing our work, we had to come to terms with the fact that diverse interpretations and belief systems run through the full spectrum of everyday Americans. I continue to be shocked by how easily survey designers and pollsters overlook the significance of question design; many seem to believe that a degree in survey methodology somehow gives them a golden key that unlocks the realities of people living entirely different lives with entirely different experiences. Our program refused to make those assumptions.
Over the years, we developed methodologies to assess the different ways groups of people understood our questions and why those differences arose. We then built a mixed‑methods approach to quantify the range of interpretations. For example, we examined how many people (and which ones) thought we were asking about anxiety as a debilitating condition and how many thought we meant the “good” kind—like the excitement you feel when scratching off a lottery ticket. From there, we could estimate how far from the truth we would be if we used one version of a question instead of another. We were able to demonstrate, empirically, which version we should ask and just how far off we would be if we chose the weaker question.
For us, this was our White Whale: quantifying measurement error. We believed this work would finally prove that rigorous question design is as essential as high‑quality survey samples. We developed internationally comparable disability questions that are now used around the world. We helped design a new race question for the U.S. government, contributed to revisions of the blood donation form, and continually updated our work to reflect the evolving science and realities of COVID‑19. Ours was the program that defined the X marker on federal passports.
And now, it seems, all of that work is gone.
Scott Pelley, the longtime anchor of CBS’s 60 Minutes, recently spoke about his dismissal and the end of the long‑running, widely respected news program. He described his own grief and his concern for colleagues who stayed on—not because they supported the changes, but because they could not afford to leave, and who now find themselves devastated by what has been lost.
Federal workers know a version of that feeling. Many of us were deeply attached to small programs that served the American public in specific, often invisible ways. We understood we were cogs in a larger machine, but we also knew our work mattered. Any serious effort to rebuild the federal workforce will have to recognize that loss—not only as a staffing problem, but as a form of grief.
I believe that the continuity of humanity rests upon the recognition that there are multiple ways in seeing and making sense of our world. These differences exist for a whole slew of reasons. Sometimes, we just can’t see how others might understand things. I still can’t fully understand where the Jehova witnesses were coming from. I did not try very hard, I admit. To me, they still seem like questionable characters trying to catch me, just like they were caught—and maybe still trying to catch the young woman who never said a word.