Albert Pullerits prize awarded to Diana Sokurova
This year, the young statistician’s prize named after Albert Pullerits was awarded to Diana Sokurova. Her master’s thesis, defended at the University of Tartu, is titled “Reducing the Reporting Burden on Health Professionals by Rolling and Two Occasions Designs”.
According to Maiki Ilves, head of the Albert Pullerits prize evaluation committee and of the Statistics Design Department at Statistics Estonia, seven papers were entered into the competition this year. “Considering the emergency situation in the spring and the relating challenges as well as obstacles to preparing and defending graduation theses, I am especially happy that we received several strong papers for the competition,” said Ilves.
“The aim of Sokurova’s Master's thesis was to investigate whether annual statistical reporting could be replaced by surveys in which only a part of healthcare providers are interviewed, but still providing estimates for the whole population on an annual basis. The committee considered it the best paper, as it deals with an important topic for Statistics Estonia: reducing the burden of data providers without negative impact on the quality of results. It is also an in-depth and easily readable study. The conclusions of the study show that it is possible to abandon studying the whole population and adopt other sampling methods, if evaluation and analysis methods are also changed,” explained Ilves.
Diana Sokurova’s thesis is available on the website of Statistics Estonia. The master’s thesis was supervised by PhD Imbi Traat.
The Albert Pullerits young statistician’s grant was first awarded by Statistics Estonia in 2011, to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Estonian statistics. Each year, the prize is given to a student whose bachelor's or master's thesis in the area of population, social life, economy or the environment applies or develops a statistical method. This year the laureate receives a 500-euro gift card.
Albert Pullerits (1892–1967) was the first director of the Estonian State Central Bureau of Statistics and the founder of the official statistics system in Estonia.
For further information:
Kaia-Liisa Tabri
Communications Partner
Marketing and Dissemination Department
Statistics Estonia
Tel +372 507 0521